Please see the [Transcriber’s Notes] at the end of this text.

THE
RURAL LIFE OF ENGLAND.

BY
WILLIAM HOWITT,
AUTHOR OF THE “BOOK OF THE SEASONS,” ETC.

SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED AND REVISED.
WITH
ILLUSTRATIONS ON WOOD BY BEWICK AND S. WILLIAMS.

LONDON:
LONGMAN, ORME, BROWN, GREEN, & LONGMANS.

1840.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY MANNING AND MASON,
IVY-LANE, ST. PAUL’S.

Preparing for Publication, in One Volume, 8vo.
THE BALLAD POETRY OF MRS. HOWITT.
To be beautifully embellished with Wood Engravings from original Designs.

TO
THOMAS AND PHEBE HOWITT,
OF HEANOR, IN THE COUNTY OF DERBY.

My dear Parents,

There are no living persons to whom this Volume can be with so much propriety inscribed as to you. To you my heart desires to present some visible token of that affection and gratitude which animate it in reviewing all the good it has derived from you. It was to your inculcations, but far more to the spirit of your daily life,—to the purity, integrity, independent feeling, and simple religion,—in fact, to the pervading and perpetual atmosphere of your house, that I owe every thing which has directed me onward in life: scorning whatever is mean; aspiring after whatever is generous and noble; loving the poor and the weak, and fearless of the strong; in a word, every thing which has not only prolonged life but blessed and sanctified it. Following your counsels and example, I have striven not so much for wealth as for an independent spirit and a pure conscience. Do I not owe you much for these? But besides this, it was under your roof that I passed a childhood and youth the happiest that ever were passed; it was there that I imbibed that love of nature, which must live though it cannot die with me. But beyond this, the present volume is descriptive of that rural life, to which your ancestors for many generations, and yourselves to an honourable old age, have been invariably and deeply attached. To you, therefore, for these and a thousand other kindred reasons,

The present Volume is Inscribed,
By your affectionate Son,
THE AUTHOR.

O, dear Britain! O my mother isle!
Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy
To me, a son, a brother, and a friend,
A husband, and a father! who revere
All bonds of natural love, and find them all
Within the limits of thy rocky shores.
O native Britain! O my mother isle!
How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain rills,
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
Have drank in all my intellectual life,
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of the God in nature,
All lovely and all honourable things,
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
The joys and greatness of its future being.
There lives not form nor feeling in my soul
Unborrowed from my country. O divine
And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole
And most magnificent temple, in the which
I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,
Loving the God who made me.

Coleridge.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

The kind and most cordial greeting which this work has received from the public, and by which a very large impression has been speedily exhausted, demands a prompt and grateful acknowledgement. After all, the highest gratification which an author can derive from his writings, next to the persuasion that he has effected some good to his fellow-creatures, is felt in the generous echo of his own sentiments, which reaches him from the amiable and intelligent of his countrymen and countrywomen, on all sides and of every class, and in the nearer sympathy and communication into which he is brought with such minds. With respect to the opinions of the Press, there is one fact connected with this work which I state with peculiar gratification, because it does honour to human nature,—and that is, that the very warmest approbation has been, in the greater number of instances, bestowed upon it by those critics to whom the author is most decidedly opposed in political opinion. I cannot, either, refrain from observing, that though I did hope to find a quick response in the hearts of Englishmen on a subject in which both the author and his countrymen are alike so deeply interested, I could not anticipate the delight which Americans have manifested in it; and I must take this opportunity, as it is the only one afforded me, to express my sense of the interesting letter of “An American Lady—a stranger in this country,” with a copy of Bryant’s Poems.

Many evidences of the interest felt in this work by my English readers, known and unknown, and of the benefit thence derived to the work by most valuable corrections and novel information, will become apparent in the progress of perusal.

I have only to add, chiefly from the preface to the former edition, that my object in this volume has been to present to the reader a view of the Rural Life of England at the present period, as seen in all classes and all parts of the country. For this purpose I have not merely depended upon my acquaintance with rural life, which has been that of a great portion of my own life from boyhood, but I have literally travelled, and a great deal of it on foot, from the Land’s-End to the Tweed, penetrating into the retirements, and witnessing the domestic life of the country in primitive seclusions and under rustic roofs. If the mountains and valleys, the fair plains and sea-coasts, the halls and farm-houses, the granges, and cottages of shepherds, miners, peasants, or fishermen, be visited in this volume with a tenth part of the enjoyment with which I have visited them in their reality, it must be a delightful book indeed; for no moments of my existence have been more deliciously spent, than those in which I have wandered from spot to spot of this happy and beautiful island, surveying its ancient monuments, and its present living men and manners.

The embellishments of this volume are both designed and engraved by Samuel Williams: the only exceptions being, that I am indebted to our accomplished friend the late Miss Twamley of Birmingham, now Mrs. Meredith, of Australia, for the sketch on the title-page; for those of the Charcoal-burner’s Hut, and Morgan Lewis’s last View of the Fairies, to our excellent young friend Miss Tregellis, of Neath Abbey; that of Purkiss’s Hut, New Forest, to Mrs. Southey; and to the amiable family of the late Father of Modern Wood-Engraving—the unrivalled Thomas Bewick, for the Otter-Hunt, at page 302, and the Street-Scene at page 324 of this work, left at his death by that eminent artist unpublished. Both pieces will be found characteristic of the hand from which they come; and the Street-Scene, in particular, is full of those happy satirical sallies which give such piquancy to many of his productions.

W. H.

West-end Cottage, Esher, Surrey,
April 16th, 1840.

LIST OF EMBELLISHMENTS.

CONTENTS.

PART I.
RURAL LIFE, PURSUITS, AND ADVANTAGES OF THE GENTRY OF ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.
PRE-EMINENCE OF ENGLAND AS A PLACE OF COUNTRY RESIDENCE.

Let every man who has a sufficiency for the enjoyment of life, thank heaven most fervently that he lives in this country and age. They may tell us of the beauty of southern skies, and the softness of southern climates; but where is the land which a man would rather choose to call himself a native of—because it combines more of the requisites for a happy and useful existence; more of the moral, social, and intellectual advantages, without which fair skies or soft climates would become dolorous, or at best, indifferent? I say, let every man gratefully rejoice, who has the means of commanding the full blessings of English life,—for alas! there are thousands and millions of our countrymen who possess but a scanty portion of these; whose lives are too long and continuous a course of toil and anxiety to permit them even to look round them and see how vast are the powers of enjoyment in this country, and how few of those sources of ease, comfort, and refined pleasure are within their reach. I trust a better day is coming to this portion of our population; that many circumstances are working together to confer on the toiling children of these kingdoms the social rewards which their unwearied industry so richly merits; but for those who already hold in their hands the golden key, where is the country like England? If we are naturally proud of making a portion of a mighty and a glorious kingdom, where is the kingdom like England? It is a land of which the most ambitious or magnanimous spirit may well say with a high emotion—“That is my country!” Over what an extent of the earth it stretches its territories; over what swarming and diversified millions it extends its sceptre! On every side of the globe, lie its outspread regions; under every aspect of heaven, walk its free or tributary people. In the West Indies; in the vaster dominions of the East; in America and Australia; through each wide continent, and many a fair island! But its political and moral power extends even far beyond these. What nation is there, however great, that does not look with breathless anxiety to the movements of England; what country is not bound up with it in the strongest interests and hopes; what country is there which does not feel the influence of its moral energy? Through all the cities and forests of Republican America, the spirit of England, as well as its language, lives and glows. France, Germany, and even Russia to the depths of its frozen heart, feel the emanations of its free and popular institutions. Every pulse of love which beats here—every principle of justice that is more clearly recognised—every sentiment of Christianity that is elevated on the broad basis of the human heart, hence spreads through the earth as from a centre of moral life, and produces in the remotest regions its portion of civilization.

Hence do I love my country!—and partake
Of kindred agitations for her sake;
She visits oftentimes my midnight dream;
Her glory meets me with the earliest beam
Of light, which tells that morning is awake.—Wordsworth.

It is something to make a part, however small, of such a nation. It is something to feel that you have such a scope of power and beneficence in the earth. But when you add to this, the food laid up for the heart and the intellect in this island—the wealth of literature and science; the spirit of freedom in which they are nourished, and by which they are prosecuted; the sound religious feeling which has always distinguished it as a nation; the philanthropic institutions that exist in it—every true heart must felicitate itself that its lot is cast in this kingdom.

Such are the moral, political, and intellectual advantages of English life, which must make any noble-minded and reflecting man feel, as he considers his position in the scale of humanity, that he is “a citizen of no mean city.” But our social advantages are not a whit behind these. Can any state of society be well conceived, on which the arts and sciences, literature, and general knowledge, can shed more social conveniences and refined enjoyments? In our houses, in our furniture, in all the materials for our dresses, in the apparatus for our tables and the endless variety of good things by which they are supplied, for which every region has been traversed, and every art in bringing them home, or raising them at home, has been exerted; in books and paintings; in the wonderful provision and accumulation of every article in our shops, that the real wants or the most fanciful desires of men or women may seek for; in our gardens, roads, the beautiful and affluent cultivation of the country,—what nation is there, or has there been, which can for a moment bear a comparison with England?

Ye miserable ancients, had ye these?

And this we may ask, not merely as it respects gas, steam, the marvellous developments of chemistry and electro-magnetism, by which the mode and embellishment of our existence have been so much changed already, and which promise yet changes too vast to be readily familiarized to the imagination,—but of a thousand other privileges and conveniences in which England is pre-eminent. It is, however, to our rural life that we are about to devote our attention; and it is in rural life that the superiority of England is, perhaps, more striking, than in any other respect. Over the whole face of our country the charm of a refined existence is diffused. There is nothing which strikes foreigners so much as the beauty of our country abodes, and the peculiarity of our country life. The elegances, the arts, and refinements of the city, are carried out and blended, from end to end of the island, so beautifully with the peaceful simplicity of the country, that nothing excites more the admiration of strangers than those rural paradises, the halls, castles, abbeys, lodges, and cottages, in which our nobility and gentry spend more or less of every year. Let Prince Pückler Muskau, Washington Irving, Willis, Count Pecchio, Rice, and others, tell you how beautiful, in their eyes, appeared the parks, lawns, fields, and the whole country of England, cultivated like a garden. It is true that our climate is not to be boasted of for its perpetual serenity. It has had no lack of abuse, both from our own countrymen and others. We are none of us without a pretty lively memory of its freaks and changes, its mists and tempests; its winters wild as some of late, and its springs that are often so tardy in their arrival, that they find summer standing in the gate to tell them they are no longer wanted. All this we know; yet which of us is not ready to forgive all this, and to say with a full heart,

England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!

Which of us is not grateful and discerning enough to remember, that even our fickle and imperfect climate has qualities to which England owes much of its glory, and we, many a proud feeling and victorious energy? Which of us can forget, that this abused climate, is that which has not enervated by its heats, has not seduced by its amenities, has not depopulated by its malaria, so that under its baneful influence we have become feeble, listless, reckless of honour or virtue; the mean, the slothful, the crouching slaves of barbarians, or even effeminate despots: it is that which has done none of these things; produced no such effects as these; but it is that which has raised millions of frames strong and muscular and combatant, and enduring as the oaks of its rocky hills; that has nerved those frames to the contempt alike of danger and effeminacy; and has quickened them with hearts full of godlike aspirations after a virtuous glory. What a long line—what ages after ages, of invincible heroes, of dauntless martyrs for freedom and religion, of solemn sages and lawgivers, of philosophers and poets, men sober, and prescient, and splendid in all their endowments as any country ever produced;—what a line of these has flourished amid the glooms and severities of this abused climate; and while Italy has sunk into subjection, and Greece has lain waste beneath the feet of the Turk—has piled up by a succession of matchless endeavours the fame and power of England, to the height of its present greatness.

In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of earth’s best blood, have titles manifold.

And will any man tell me that the spirit of our climate has had nothing to do with begetting and nourishing the energy which has borne on to immortality these great men; which has quickened us with “earth’s best blood;” which has given us “titles manifold?” The gloom and desolate majesty of autumn—the wild magnificence of thunder-storms, with their vivid lightnings, their awful uproar, the lurid darkness of their clouds, and the outshining of rainbows—have these had no effect on the meditations of divines and the songs of poets? Has the soul-concentrating power of winter driven our writers into their closets in vain? Have the fireside festivities of our darkest season; have the blazing yule-clog, and the merriment of the old English hall—things which have grown out of the very asperity of the climate, left no traces in our literature? Did Milton, Bacon, Spenser, Shakspeare, and such spirits, walk through our solemn halls, whether of learning, or religion, or baronial pomp, all of which have been raised by the very genius of a pensive climate; or did they climb our mountains, and roam our forests, amid winds that roared in the boughs and whirled their leaves at their feet, and gather thence no imagery, no similes, no vigour of thought and language, such as still skies and flowery meadows could not originate? Let us turn to the lays and romances of Scott and Byron, and see whether brown heaths and splintered mountains; the savage ruins of craggy coasts, moaning billows, mists, and rains; the thunder of cataracts, and the sleep of glens, all seen and felt under the alternations of seasons and of weather, such only as an unsettled climate could shew,—have not tinged their spirits, and therefore their works, with hues of an immortal beauty, the splendid product of a boisterous climate. Why, they are these influences which have had no small share in the creation of such men as Burns, Bloomfield, Hogg, and Clare—the shepherd-poets of a free land, and an out-of-door life. Yes, we are indebted to our climate for a mass of good, a host of advantages of which we little dream, till we begin to count them up.

And are all our experiences of the English climate those of gloom? Are there no glorious sunsets, no summer evenings, balmy as our dreams of heaven, no long sunny days of summer, no dewy mornings, whose freshness brings with it ideas of earth in its youth, and the glades of Paradise trod by the fair feet of Eve? Have we no sweet memories of youth and friendship, in which such hours, such days, in which fields of harvest, hay-harvest and corn-harvest, with all their rejoicing rustic companies, lie in the sunshine? Are there none of excursions through the mountains, along the sea shores, of sailing on fair lakes, or lying by running waters in green and flowery dales, while overhead shone out skies so blue and serene that they seemed as though they could never change? In every English bosom there lie many such sweet memories; and if we look through the whole of one of the worst seasons that we have, what intervals of pleasant weather we find in it. One of the great charms of this country too, dependent on its climate, is that rich and almost perpetual greenness, of which strangers always speak with admiration.

But what of climate? There are other claims on our affections for this noble country, which, were its climate the most splendid under heaven, would yet cast that far into the shade. What binds us closely to it, next to our living ties, is that every inch of English ground is sanctified by noble deeds, and intellectual renown; but on this topic Mrs. Howitt has, in her Wood-Leighton, put into the mouth of a worthy clergyman of Staffordshire, words that will better express my feelings, than any I can now use.

“I know not how it is; I cannot comprehend the feeling, with which many quit this noble country for ever for strange lands. And yet it may be said, that hundreds do it every day; and for thousands it may indeed be well. For those who have had no prospect but the daily struggle for existence; for those whose minds have not been opened and quickened into a sense of the higher and more spiritual enjoyments which this country affords; for the labouring many, the valleys of Australia or the vast forests and prairies of America may be alluring. But to me,—and therefore, it seems, equally to other men with like tastes and attachments—to quit England, noble, fearless, magnanimous, and Christian England, would be to cut asunder life, and hope, and happiness at once. No! till I voyage to ‘the better land,’ I could never quit England. What! after all the ages that have been spent in making it habitable, and home-like; after all the blood shed in its defence, and for the maintaining of its civil polity; after all the consumption of patriotic thought and enterprise, the labours of philosophers, divines, and statesmen, to civilize and Christianize it; after the time, the capital, the energies employed, from age to age, to cultivate its fields, dry up marshes, build bridges, and lay down roads, raise cities, and fill every house with the products of the arts and the wealth of literature; can there be a spot of earth that can pretend to a tithe of its advantages, or a spot that creates in the heart that higher tone necessary for their full enjoyment? Why, every spot of this island is sanctified, not only by the efforts of countless patriots, but as the birth-place and abode of men of genius. Go where you will, places present themselves to your eyes which are stamped with the memory of some one or other of those ‘burning and shining lights,’ that have illuminated the atmosphere of England with their collective splendour, and made it visible to the men of farthest climates. Even in this secluded district, which, beautiful as it is, is comparatively little known or spoken of, amongst the generality of English people, how many literary recollections surround you! To say nothing of the actors in great historical scenes; the Talbots, Shrewsburys, Dudleys, and Bagots of former ages; or the Ansons, Vernons, St. Vincents, and Pagets of the later and present ones; in this county were born those excellent bishops, Hurd and Newton, and the venerable antiquary and herald, Elias Ashmole. To say nothing of the amount of taste and knowledge that exist in the best classes of society hereabout, we have to-day passed the houses of Thomas Gisborne and Edward Cooper, clergymen who have done honour to their profession by their talents and the liberality of their sentiments. In that antiquated Fauld Hall, once lived old Squire Burton, the brother of the author of the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy;’ and there is little doubt that some part of that remarkable work was written there. By that Dove, Izaak Walton, that pious old man, that lover of the fields, and historian of the worthies of the church, used to stroll and meditate, or converse with his friend Charles Cotton, a Staffordshire man too. In the woods of Wotton, which are very visible hence by daylight, once wandered a very different, but very distinguished person, the wayward Rousseau. In Uttoxeter, that great, but ill-used, and ill-understood astronomer, Flamstead, received the greater part of his education; and from Lichfield, the spires of whose cathedral we have seen to-day, went out Johnson and Garrick, each to achieve supremacy in his own track of distinction. And there, too, lived Anna Seward, who, with all her egotism and faults of taste, was superior to the women of her age, and had the sagacity to perceive amongst the very first, the dawning fame of Southey and Sir Walter Scott.

“If this comparatively obscure district can thus boast of having given birth or abode to so many influential intellects, what shall not England—entire and glory-crowned England? And who shall not feel proud to own himself of its race and kindred; and, if he can secure for himself a moderate share of its common goods, be happy to live and die in it!”

Thus it is all England through. There is no part of it, in which you do not become aware that there some portion of our national glory has originated. The very coachmen as you traverse the highways, continually point out to you spots made sacred by men and their acts. There say they, was born, or lived, Milton or Shakspeare, Locke or Bacon, Pope or Dryden; that was the castle of Chaucer; there, now, lives Wordsworth, Southey, or Moore. There Queen Elizabeth was confined in her youth, here she confined Mary of Scotland in her age. There Wickliffe lived, and here his ashes were scattered in the air by his enemies. There Hooker watched his sheep while he pondered on his Ecclesiastical Polity. Here was born Cromwell, or Hampden—here was the favourite retreat of Chatham, Fox, Pitt, or other person, who in his day exerted a powerful influence on the mind or fortunes of this country. These perpetual monitions that we are walking in a land filled from end to end with glorious reminiscences, make country residence in England so delightful. But the testimony of foreigners is more conclusive than our own; and therefore, we will close this chapter with the impression which the entrance into England made on two Americans—Washington Irving and Mr. Willis. Irving’s mind was full of the inspiration of the character of England as he had found it in books. “There is to an American, a volume of associations with the very name. It is the land of promise, teeming with every thing of which his childhood has heard, or on which his studious years have pondered. The ships of war, that prowled like guardian giants along the coast; the headlands of Ireland, stretching out into the Channel; the Welsh mountains, towering into the clouds; all were objects of intense interest. As we sailed up the Mersey, I reconnoitred the shores with a telescope. My eye dwelt with delight on neat cottages, with their trim shrubberies and green grass-plots. I saw the mouldering ruin of an abbey overrun with ivy, and the taper spire of a village church rising from the brow of a neighbouring hill—all were characteristic of England.” That is the feeling of an American, arriving here directly from his own country: this is that of one coming from the European Continent. Mr. Willis says, on landing at Dover: “My companion led the way to an hotel, and we were introduced by English waiters (I had not seen such a thing in three years, and it was quite like being waited on by gentlemen) to two blazing coal fires in the coffee-room of the ‘Ship.’ O, what a comfortable place it appeared! A rich Turkey carpet snugly fitted; nicely rubbed mahogany tables; the morning papers from London; bell-ropes that would ring the bell; doors that would shut; a landlady that spoke English, and was kind and civil; and, though there were eight or ten people in the room, no noise above the rustle of a newspaper, and positively rich red damask curtains, neither second-hand nor shabby, to the windows! A greater contrast than this, to the things that answer to them on the Continent, could scarcely be imagined. The fires were burning brilliantly, and the coffee-room was in the nicest order when we descended to our breakfast at six the next morning. The tea-kettle singing on the hearth, the toast was hot, and done to a turn, and the waiter was neither sleepy nor uncivil,—all, again, very unlike a morning at an hotel in La belle France. England is described always very justly, and always in the same words, ‘it is all one garden.’ There is scarce a cottage, between Dover and London (seventy miles) where a poet might not be happy to live. I saw a hundred little spots I coveted with quite a heart-ache. Everybody seemed employed, and everybody well-made and healthy. The relief from the deformity and disease of the way-side beggars of the Continent was very striking.”

It is through this England, thus worthy of our love, whether as seen by our own eyes, or the eyes of intelligent foreigners, that we are about to make our progress, visiting plain and mountain, farm and hamlet, and making acquaintance with the dwellings, habits, and feelings of both gentle and simple.

CHAPTER II.
ENVIABLE POSITION OF THE ENGLISH COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, AS REGARDS ALL THE PLEASURES AND ADVANTAGES OF LIFE.

Alexander of Macedon said if he were not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes; Alexander of Russia also said if he were not Alexander, he would choose to be an English gentleman. And truly, it would require some ingenuity to discover any earthly lot like that of the English gentleman. The wealth and refinement at which this country has arrived, have thrown round English rural life every possible charm. Every art and energy is exerted in favour of the English gentleman. Look at the ancient castle, or the mansion of later ages, and then at the dwelling of the private gentleman now, and what a difference! The castle with its dungeon-like apartments, its few loop-holes for windows, its walls, mounds, moats, drawbridges, and other defences to keep out the hostile prowlers which a semi-savage state of society brought, ever and anon, around it. Look at its naked walls, its massy, lumbering doors, its floors spread with rushes, and the rude style in which bed and board were constructed and served; and then turn your eyes on the modern mansion of the country gentleman. What a lovely sight is that! What a bright and pleasant abode, instead of that heavy, martial pile! What a fair country—what a peaceful, well-ordered population surround it, instead of dreary forests, and savage hordes! And look again at the mansion of the feudal ages; see its large, cheerless, tapestried halls, its ill-fitting doors and windows, through which the wintry winds come whistling and careering. What naked, or rush-strewn floors still; what rude fashion of furniture, and vessels for the table; what a rude style of cookery; what a dearth of books; what a miserable and scanty display of portraits on the walls, making those they are intended to represent, look grim and hard as a generation of ogres. Then again, look at the modern mansion. What a snug and silken nest of delight is that. See what the progress of the arts and civilization has done for it. How light and airily it rises in some lovely spot. How it is carpeted, and draped with rich hangings and curtains. What soft and elegant beds; what a superior grace in the fashion of furniture, and all household utensils. Silver and gold, brass and steel, porcelain and glass, into what rich and beautiful shapes have they been wrought by skilful hands for all purposes. See what a variety of rooms; what a variety of inventions in those rooms, which artificial and refined wants have called into existence. What books enrich the fair library; what glorious paintings grace its delicately-papered walls. Hark! music is issuing from instruments of novel and most ingenious construction. And all around what a splendidly cultivated country! What lovely gardens, in which flowers from every region are blowing. Here is a vast change!—a vast advance from the rude life of our ancestors; and the more we look into the present state of domestic life, the more we shall perceive the admirable perfection of its economy and arrangements. What was the life of our great nobility formerly in their country halls? With little intercourse with the capital; in the midst of huge forests, and almost impassable roads; hunting and carousing were their chief pleasures and employments, amid a throng of rude retainers. Look now at the mode of life of a private gentleman of no extraordinary revenue. When he comes down in a morning, he finds on his breakfast-table the papers which left London probably on the previous evening, bringing him the news of the whole world. There is nothing which is going on in Parliament, in the courts of law, in public meetings in the capital, or in any town of the kingdom; no birth, marriage, death, or any occurrence of importance, but they are all laid before him; there is nothing done or said in the mercantile, the literary, the scientific world, nothing which can affect the interests of his country in the most remote degree; nothing, indeed, which can thoroughly affect the well-being of men all the world over, but there it is too. He sits in the midst of his woods and groves, in the quietness of the country a hundred miles from the capital, and is as well acquainted with the movements and incidents of society as a reigning prince could have been some years ago, by couriers, correspondents, spies, fast-sailing packets, and similar agencies, maintained by all the aid and revenues of a nation. And for his morning meal, China and the Indies, east and west, send him their tea, coffee, sugar, chocolate, and preserved fruits. Lapland sends its reindeer tongues; Westphalia its hams; and his own rich land abundance of rural dainties. When breakfast is over, if he ask himself how he shall pass the day, what numerous and inexhaustible resources present themselves to his choice. Will he have music? The ladies of his family can give it him, in a high style of excellence. Does he love paintings? His walls, and those of his wealthy neighbours, are covered with them. There are said to be more of the works of the great masters accumulated in our English houses than in all the world besides. Is he fond of books? What a mass of knowledge is piled up around him! Greece, Rome, Palestine, Arabia, India, France, Germany, Italy, every country, ancient or modern, which has distinguished itself by its genius and intelligence, has poured into his halls its accumulated wealth of heart and imagination. There is hoarded up in his library, food for the most insatiate spirit for an eternity. In the literature and science merely of this country, he possesses more than the enjoyment of a life. Think only of the works of our historians and divines, of our travellers,—our natural, moral, and scientific philosophers; of the wit, the pathos, the immense extent of inventions and facts in our general literature; of the glorious and ennobling themes of our great poets. What a mighty difference is there between the existence of one of our old baronial ancestors, who could not read, but as he sate over his winter fire solaced his spirit with the lays of a wandering minstrel; and of him who has at his command all the intellectual splendour, power and wit, the satire, the joyous story, the humour, the elegance of phrase and of mind, the profound sentiment and high argument of such men as Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Steele, Pope, Sam Johnson, Goldsmith, Cowper, and the noble poets of the present day. Is it possible that ennui can come near a man who can at any moment call to his presence our Jeremy Taylors and Tillotsons, our Barrows, Burnets, and Stillingfleets—our travellers from every corner of the earth, and our great novelists with their everlasting inventions? Why, there is more delight in one good country library, than any one mortal life can consume. If a man’s house were situated in a desert of sand, the magic of this divine literature were enough to raise around him an elysium of perpetual greenness.

But it is not merely within doors that the singular privileges of an English gentleman lie. He need only step out, and he sees them surrounding him on every side. His gardens—by the labours and discoveries of centuries, by the genius of some men who have blended the spirit of nature most happily with that of art, and by the researches of others who have collected into this country the vegetable beauty and wealth of the whole world—have been made more delightful than those of Alcinous or Armida. Look at his glazed walls, his hot and green houses, which supply his table with the most delicious dessert. But go on—advance beyond the boundaries of his gardens, and the pleasant winding walks of his shrubberies, and where are you? In the midst of his park, his farms, his woods, and plantations. Now every one knows the healthful and perpetual recreation to be found in any one of these places; the intense delight which many of our country gentlemen take in them, and the beauty and pre-eminence of our English parks, farms, and woods, in consequence. We shall speak more particularly of them presently; but it must not here be forgotten what a boundless field of enjoyment, and increase of wealth, science has of late years opened to the amateur farmer, and to the country gentlemen in general. To their fields, agricultural chemistry, mineralogy, botany, vegetable physiology, entomology, etc., have brought new and inexhaustible charms. They have, in a manner, enlarged the territories of the smallest proprietor into kingdoms of boundless extent and interest. In the study of soils, their defects and remedies; in the selection of plants most consonant to the earth in which they are to grow, or the adaptation of the earth to them; in the inquiry into the mineral wealth that lies below the surface; in cultivating an acquaintance with the various animals, and especially insects, on whose presence or absence depends in a great degree the proper growth or destruction of crops and young woods: in all these the country gentleman has a source of noble and profitable employment for the main part unknown to his ancestors, and worthy of his most earnest pursuit.

But, if all these means of happiness were not enough to satisfy his desires, or did not chime in with his taste, see what another field of animating and praiseworthy endeavour lies before him still, in the official service of his country. Retaining his character of a country gentleman, he can accept the office of a magistrate, and become, if so disposed, a real benefactor and peacemaker to his neighbourhood. But he need not stop here. There is no country, not excepting British America, where the path of public service lies so open to a man of fortune, or is so wide in its reach. He can enter Parliament; and residing part of the year in the country, can during the other part take his place in an assembly, that for the importance of its discussions and acts has no fellow; for there is no other legislative assembly in the whole world where, with similar freedom of constitution, the same mighty mass of human interests is concerned—to which the same vast extent of influence is appended. I need do no more in proof of this, than merely point to the position of England amid the nations of the earth; her wealth and activity at home; her enormous territories abroad. Over all this,—over this extent of country, over these millions of beings, there is not a single country gentleman who has the ambition, but who may be called to exercise an influence. Here is a field of labour, enough of itself to fill the amplest desires, and by which, if he have the talent, any man of fortune may rise to the highest pitch of rank and distinction.

But if the country gentleman have not the ambition, or the love of so active a life; if he desire to enjoy himself in a different way, there is yet abundant choice. He may travel, if he please; and what a rich expanse of pleasures and interests lies before him in that direction. In our own islands there is a variety of scenery not to be rivalled in the same space in any other part of the world. The mountains, the lakes, the rivers of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, those of Cumberland and Derbyshire; the rich plains; the busy cities, with all their arts and curious manufactures; our ports, with all their interesting scenes; the various historical and antiquarian objects; the numerous breeds of cattle, sheep, and horses; the varied kinds of vegetable products, and modes of farming;—these, to a mind of any taste and intelligence, offer plentiful matter of observation in short summer excursions. And what splendid roads, fleet horses, convenient carriages, and excellent inns, are ready to convey him on the way, or receive him for refreshment. If he is disposed to go abroad, who has the money, or the education, to give facility and advantage to travel in every region like the English gentleman?—Such are the privileges and pleasures attendant on the country gentleman of England. In all these he has, or may have, the society of women whose beauty and intelligence are everywhere acknowledged; and for the ladies of England living in the country, there are books, music, the garden, the conservatory—an abundance of elegant and womanly occupations. There are drives through woods and fields of the most delicious character; there is social intercourse with neighbouring wealthy families, and a host of kind offices to poor ones, which present the sweetest sources of enjoyment.

I think the extraordinary blessings and privileges of English rural life have never been sufficiently considered. It is only when we begin to count them up that we become aware of their amount, and surpassing character. What is there of divine sentiment or earthly knowledge, of physical, intellectual, or religious good; what is there of generous, social, reflective, retiring or aspiring; what is there of freshness and beauty; of luxurious in life, or preparatory to a peaceful death; what is there that can purify the spirit, ennoble the heart, and prompt men to a wise and extensive beneficence, which may not be found in English rural life? It has every thing in it which is beautiful, and may become glorious and godlike.

Such golden deeds lead on to golden days,
Days of domestic peace—by him who plays
On the great stage how uneventful thought;
Yet with a thousand busy projects fraught,
A thousand incidents that stir the mind
To pleasure, such as leaves no sting behind!
Such as the heart delights in—and records
Within how silently—in more than words!
A Holiday—the frugal banquet spread
On the fresh herbage, near the fountain-head.
With quips and cranks—what time the woodlark there
Scatters his loose notes on the sultry air;
What time the kingfisher sits hushed below,
Where silver-bright the water-lilies blow:—
A Wake—the booths whitening the village green,
Where Punch and Scaramouch aloft are seen;
Sign beyond sign in close array unfurled,
Picturing at large the wonders of the world;
And far and wide, over the Vicar’s pale,
Black hoods and scarlet crossing hill and dale,
All, all abroad, and music in the gale:—
A Wedding Dance—a dance into the night,
On the barn-floor, when maiden feet are light;
When the young bride receives the promised dower,
And flowers are flung, herself a fairer flower:
A Morning-visit to the poor man’s shed,
(Who would be rich while one was wanting bread?)
Where all are emulous to bring relief,
And tears are falling fast—but not for grief;—
A Walk in Spring—Grattan, like those with thee
By the heath-side (who had not envied me?)
When the sweet limes, so full of bees in June,
Led us to meet beneath their boughs at noon:
And thou didst say which of the great and wise,
Could they but hear and at thy bidding rise,
Thou would’st call up and question.
Graver things
Come in their turn. Morning and evening brings
Its holy office; and the sabbath bell,
That over wood and wild, and mountain-dell,
Wanders so far, chasing all thoughts unholy,
With sounds most musical, most melancholy,
Not on his ear is lost. Then he pursues
The pathway leading through the aged yews,
Nor unattended; and when all are there,
Pours out his spirit in the House of Prayer,—
That House with many a funeral-garland hung,
Of virgin white—memorials of the young;
The last yet fresh when marriage chimes were ringing,
And hope and joy in other hearts were springing;—
That House where age led in by filial love,—
Their looks composed, their thoughts on things above,
The world forgot, or all its wrongs forgiven—
Who would not say they trod the path to Heaven?

Rogers’ Human Life.

CHAPTER III.
LIFE OF THE GENTRY IN THE COUNTRY.

One of the chief features of the life of the nobility and gentry of England, is their annual visit to the metropolis; and it is one which has a most essential influence upon the general character of rural life itself. The greater part of the families of rank and fortune flock up to town annually, as punctually as the Jews flocked up to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover; and it may be said for the purpose of worship too, though worship of a different kind—that of fashion. A considerable portion of them being, more or less, connected with one or other House of Parliament, go up at the opening of Parliament, generally in February, and remain there till the adjournment, often in July; but the true season does not commence till April.

When April verdure springs in Grosvenor Square,
Then the furred beauty comes to winter there.—Rogers.

Much has been said of the evil effect of this aristocratic habit, of spending so much time in the metropolis; of the vast sums there spent in ostentatious rivalry, in equipage and establishments; in the dissipations of theatres, operas, routes, and gaming-houses; and unquestionably, there is much truth in it. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that this annual assembling together has some advantages. A great degree of knowledge and refinement results from it, amid all the attendant folly and extravagance. The wealthy are brought into contact with vast numbers of their equals and superiors, and that sullen and haughty habit of reserve is worn off, which is always contracted by those who live in solitary seclusion, in the midst of vast estates, with none but tenants and dependents around them. They are also brought into contact with men of talent and intelligence. They move amongst books and works of art, and are induced by different motives to become patrons and possessors of these things. If they spend large sums in splendid houses and establishments in town, such houses and such establishments become equally necessary to them in the country; and it is by this means that, instead of old and dreary castles and chateaux, we have such beautiful mansions, so filled with rich paintings and elegant furniture, dispersed all over England. From these places, as centres existing here and there, similar tastes are spread through the less wealthy classes, and the elegances of life flow into the parsonages, cottages, and abodes of persons of less income and less intercourse with society. In town, undoubtedly, a vast number of the aristocracy spend their time and money very foolishly; but it is equally true, that many others spend theirs very beneficially to the country. Men of fortune from all quarters of the kingdom there meet, and every thing which regards the improvement of their estates is discussed. They hear of different plans pursued in different parts of the kingdom. They make acquaintances, and these acquaintances lead to visits, in which they observe, and copy all that can add to the embellishment of their abodes, and the value and productiveness of their gardens and estates. If many acquire a relish only for Newmarket, and the gaming club, and a strong distaste for the quiet enjoyments of the country; many, on the other hand, come down to their estates after a season of hurry and over-excitement, with a fresh feeling for the beauty and repose of their country abodes. The possessors of great houses and estates, invite a party to spend the recess, or especially the shooting season, with them. Thus the world of fashion is broken up and scattered from the metropolis into a multitude of lesser circles, and into every corner of the empire. I can conceive nothing which bears on its surface the aspect of the perfection of human society, so much as this assembling of a choice party of those who have nothing to do but to enjoy life, in the house of some hospitable wealthy man, in some one of the terrestrial paradises of this kingdom,—far off, in some retired vale of England, where the country and its manners remain almost as simple and picturesque as they did ages ago. In some fine Elizabethan mansion, some splendid baronial castle, as Warwick, Alnwick, or Raby; or in some rich old abbey; amid woods and parks, or seated on one of our wild coasts; or amid the mountains of Wales or Scotland, with all their beautiful scenery, rocks, hanging cliffs, dashing waterfalls, rapid rivers, and fairy wildernesses around them. Here, assembled from the crush and rush of London in its fulness, with new books and new music brought down with them; with plenty of topics suggested by the incidents of the past season in the saloons of the fashionable, and in Parliament; with every luxury before them; with fine shrubberies and parks, and with every vehicle and facility for riding and driving through field or forest, or sailing on river or ocean; if people are not happy in such circumstances, where is the fault?

And imagine the possessor of a noble estate coming down to receive his friends there. To a high and generous mind there must be something very delightful in it. When he enters his own neighbourhood, he enters his own kingdom. The very market-town through which he last passes, is, probably, totally or three-fourths of it his property. If he be a kind and liberal man, the respect which is there testified towards him, has in it the most cordial of flatteries. When he touches his own land, every thing acknowledges his absolute sway. On all sides he sees symptoms of welcome. Wherever he looks, they are the woods, the parks, the fields of his ancestors, and now his own, that meet his eyes. The freshness and greenness of the fields, the sombre grandeur of the woods, the peaceful elegance of his house, all the odours of flowers breathing through the rooms, and the sight of rich fruits on his walls and in his hothouses; after the heat, dust, crowding, noise, political contention, and turning night into day, of London, must be peculiarly grateful. Here he is sole lord and master; and from him, he feels, flow the good of his dependent people, and the pleasures of his distinguished guests. The same where

Far to the south a mountain vale retires,
Rich in its groves, and glens, and village spires;
Its upland lawns, and cliffs with foliage hung,
Its wizard stream, nor nameless nor unsung;
And through the various year, the various day,
Where scenes of glory burst and melt away.—Rogers.

The hamlet, which shews its thatched roofs and lowly smoking chimneys near, is all his own; nay, the rustic church is part and parcel of the family estate. It was probably built and endowed by his ancestors. The living is in his gift, and is perhaps enjoyed by a relative, or college chum. The very churchyard, with its simple headstones, and green mounds, is separated often only by a sunk fence from his grounds. It blends into them, and the old grey tower lifts itself amongst trees which form one majestic mass with his own. The sabbath-bell rings, and he enters that old porch with his guests; he sees the banner of some brave ancestor float above his head, and the hatchments and memorial inscriptions of others on the walls. What can be more delicately flattering to all the feelings of a human creature; what lot can be more perfect?

The ease and perfect freedom from ceremony in these rural gatherings is a feature which has always excited the admiration of foreigners. Every guest has his own apartment, where he can retire at pleasure, and after taking his meals in common can spend the day as he chooses. But, as I have before said, we see our own customs and manners better in the descriptions of foreigners, because they are described by them as they are seen, with the freshness of novelty. Prince Pückler Muskau speaks with enthusiasm of the country-houses and park scenery of England. His book, indeed, is full of such pictures of country life and scenery. The beautiful dairies which he sometimes found in noblemen’s parks delighted him extremely. Thus he speaks of the one at Woburn Abbey:—“The dairy is a prominent and beautiful object. It is a sort of Chinese temple, decorated with a profusion of white marble, and coloured glasses; in the centre is a fountain, and round the walls hundreds of large dishes and bowls, of Chinese and Japan porcelain of every form and colour, filled with new milk and cream. The ‘consoles’ upon which these vessels stand, are perfect models for Chinese furniture. The windows are of ground-glass, with Chinese painting, which shews fantastically enough by the dim light.”

But the testimony of Mr. Willis as an American, and therefore accustomed to a life and sentiment more allied to our own, is still stronger. His account of his visit to Gordon Castle is a perfect example of all such scenes, and is an exact counterpart of the German Prince’s description of the English “vie de château,” in his third volume, p. 311.

“The immense iron gate, surmounted by the Gordon arms; the handsome and spacious stone lodges on either side; the canonically fat porter, in white stockings and grey livery, lifting his hat as he swung open the massive portal, all bespoke the entrance to a noble residence. The road within was edged with velvet sward, and rolled to the smoothness of a terrace walk; the winding avenue lengthened away before with trees of every variety of foliage; light carriages passed me, driven by gentlemen or ladies, bound on their afternoon airing; a groom led up and down two beautiful blood-horses, prancing along with side-saddles and morocco stirrups; and keepers with hounds and terriers, gentlemen on foot, idling along the walks, and servants in different liveries hurrying to and fro, betokened a scene of busy gaiety before me. I had hardly noted these various circumstances, before a sudden curve in the road brought the castle into view,—a vast stone pile with castellated wings; and in another moment I was at the door, where a dozen lounging and powdered menials were waiting on a party of ladies and gentlemen to their several carriages. It was the moment for the afternoon drive.

“The last phaeton dashed away, and my chaise advanced to the door. A handsome boy, in a kind of page’s dress, immediately came to the window, addressed me by name, and informed me that his Grace was out deer-shooting, but that my room was prepared, and he was ordered to wait on me. I followed him through a hall lined with statues, deers’ horns, and armour, and was ushered into a large chamber looking out on a park, extending with its lawns and woods to the edge of the horizon. A more lovely view never feasted human eye.

“‘Who is at the castle?’ I asked, as the boy busied himself in unstrapping my portmanteau. ‘O, a great many, sir’—he stopped in his occupation, and began counting on his fingers a long list of lords and ladies. ‘And how many sit down to dinner?’ ‘Above ninety, sir, besides the Duke and Duchess.’ ‘That will do;’ and off tripped my slender gentleman, with his laced jacket, giving the fire a terrible stir-up in his way out, and turning back to inform me that the dinner hour was seven precisely.

“It was a mild, bright afternoon, quite warm for the end of an English September, and with a fire in the room, and a soft sunshine pouring in at the windows, a seat at the open casement was far from disagreeable. I passed the time till the sun set, looking out on the park. Hill and valley lay between my eye and the horizon; sheep fed in picturesque flocks; and small fallow-deer grazed near them; the trees were planted, and the distant forest shaped by the hand of taste; and broad and beautiful as was the expanse taken in by the eye, it was evidently one princely possession. A mile from the castle-wall, the shaven sward extended in a carpet of velvet softness, as bright as emerald, studded by clumps of shrubbery, like flowers wrought elegantly in tapestry; and across it bounded occasionally a hare, and the pheasants fed undisturbed near the thickets, or a lady with flowing riding-dress and flaunting feather, dashed into sight upon her fleet blood-palfrey, and was lost the next moment in the woods, or a boy put his pony to its mettle up the ascent, or a gamekeeper idled into sight with his gun in the hollow of his arm, and his hounds at his heels. And all this little world of enjoyment and luxury and beauty lay in the hand of one man, and was created by his wealth in those northern wilds of Scotland, a day’s journey almost from the possession of another human being! I never realized so forcibly the splendid results of wealth and primogeniture.

“The sun set in a blaze of fire among the pointed firs crowning the hills; and by the occasional prance of a horse’s feet on the gravel, and the roll of rapid wheels, and now and then a gay laugh and many voices, the different parties were returning to the Castle. Soon after, a loud gong sounded through the galleries, the signal to dress, and I left my musing occupation unwillingly to make my toilet for an appearance in a formidable circle of titled aristocrats, not one of whom I had ever seen, the Duke himself a stranger to me, except through the kind letter of invitation lying on the table.

“I was sitting by the fire, imagining forms and faces for the different persons who had been named to me, when there was a knock at the door, and a tall, white-haired gentleman, of noble physiognomy, but singularly cordial address, entered with a broad red ribbon across his breast, and welcomed me most heartily to the castle. The gong sounded at the next moment, and in our way down, he named over his other guests, and prepared me, in a measure, for the introductions which followed. The drawing-room was crowded like a soirée. The Duchess, a tall and very handsome woman, with a smile of the most winning sweetness, received me at the door, and I was presented successively to every person present. Dinner was announced immediately, and the difficult question of precedence being sooner settled than I had ever seen it before in so large a party, we passed through files of servants to the dining-room. It was a large and very lofty hall, supported, at the ends, by marble columns, within which was stationed a band of music playing delightfully. The walls were lined with full-length family pictures, from old knights in armour to the modern dukes in kilt of the Gordon plaid; and on the sideboards stood services of gold plate, the most gorgeously massive, and the most beautiful in workmanship I have ever seen. There were, among the vases, several large coursing-cups, won by the Duke’s hounds, of exquisite shape and ornament.

“I fell into my place between a gentleman and a very beautiful woman, of perhaps, twenty-two, neither of whose names I remembered, though I had but just been introduced. The Duke probably anticipated as much, and as I took my seat, he called out to me, from the top of the table, that I had on my right, Lady ——, ‘the most agreeable woman in Scotland.’ It was unnecessary to say that she was the most lovely.

“I have been struck everywhere in England with the beauty of the higher classes, and as I looked around me upon the aristocratic company at the table, I thought I had never seen ‘Heaven’s image double-stamped as man, and noble,’ so unequivocally clear. * * * The band ceased playing when the ladies left the table; the gentlemen closed up, conversation assumed a merrier cast, coffee and liqueurs were brought in when the wines began to be circulated more slowly, and at eleven there was a general move to the drawing-room. Cards, tea, music, filled up the time till twelve, and then the ladies took their departure, and the gentlemen sat down to supper. I got to bed somewhere about two o’clock; and thus ended an evening, which I had anticipated as stiff and embarrassing, but which is marked in my tablets as one of the most social and kindly I have had the good fortune to record on my travels.

“I arose late in the morning, and found the large party already assembled about the breakfast table. I was struck on entering, with the different air of the room. The deep windows opening out upon the park, had the effect of sombre landscapes in oaken frames; the troops of liveried servants, the glitter of plate, the music, that had contributed to the splendour of the scene the night before, were gone. The Duke sat laughing at the head of the table, with a newspaper in his hand, dressed in a coarse shooting-jacket and coloured cravat; the Duchess was in a plain morning dress and cap of the simplest character; and the high-born women about the table, whom I had left glittering with jewels, and dressed in all the attractions of fashion, appeared in the simplest coiffure and a toilet of studied plainness. The ten or twelve noblemen present were engrossed with their letters or newspapers over tea and toast,—and in them, perhaps, the transformation was still greater. The soigné man of fashion of the night before, faultless in costume and distinguished in his appearance—in the full force of the term—was enveloped now in a coat of fustian, with a coarse waistcoat of plaid, a gingham cravat, and hob-nailed shoes, for shooting; and in place of the gay hilarity of the supper-table, wore a face of calm indifference, and eat his breakfast, and read the paper in a rarely broken silence. I wondered as I looked about me, what would be the impression of many people in my own country, could they look in upon that plain party, aware that it was composed of the proudest nobility and the highest fashion of England.

“Breakfast in England is a confidential and unceremonious hour, and servants are generally dispensed with. This is to me, I confess, an advantage it has over every other meal. I detest eating with twenty tall fellows standing opposite, whose business it is to watch me. The coffee and tea were on the table, with toast, muffins, oat-cakes, marmalade, jellies, fish, and all the paraphernalia of a Scotch breakfast; and on the sideboard stood cold meats for those who liked them, and they were expected to go to it and help themselves. Nothing could be more easy, unceremonious, and affable, than the whole tone of the meal. One after another rose and fell into groups in the windows, or walked up and down the long room, and, with one or two others, I joined the duke at the head of the table, who gave us some interesting particulars of the salmon-fisheries of the Spey. The privilege of fishing the river within his lands is bought of him at the pretty sum of eight thousand pounds a-year.

“The ladies went off unaccompanied to their walks in the park and other avocations; those bound for the covers, joined the gamekeepers, who were waiting with their dogs in the leash at the stables; and some paired off to the billiard-room. Still suffering from lameness, I declined all invitations to the shooting parties, who started across the park, with the dogs leaping about them in a frenzy of delight, and accepted the duke’s kind offer of a pony phaeton to drive down to the kennels. The duke’s breed, both of setters and hounds, is celebrated throughout the kingdom. They occupy a spacious building in the centre of a wood, a quadrangle enclosing a court, and large enough for a respectable farm-house. The chief huntsman and his family, and perhaps a gamekeeper or two, lodge on the premises, and the dogs are divided by palings across the court. I was rather startled to be introduced into the same enclosure with a dozen gigantic bloodhounds, as high as my breast, the keeper’s whip in my hand, the only defence. I was not easier for the man’s assertion, that, without it, they would ‘have the life out of me in a crack.’ They came around me very quietly, and one immense fellow, with a chest like a horse, and a head of the finest expression, stood up and laid his paws on my shoulders, with the deliberation of a friend about to favour me with some grave advice. One can scarce believe that these noble creatures have not reason like ourselves. Those slender, thoroughbred heads, large speaking eyes, and beautiful limbs and graceful action, should be gifted with more than mere animal instinct. The greyhounds were the beauties of the kennel, however; I never had seen such perfect creatures. The setters were in the next division, and really they were quite lovely. The rare tan and black dog of this race, with his silky floss hair, intelligent muzzle, good-humoured face, and caressing fondness, quite excited my admiration. There were thirty or forty of these, old and young, and a friend of the duke’s would as soon ask him for a church living, as for the present of one of them. The former would be by much the smaller favour. Then there were terriers of four or five breeds; of one family of which, long-haired, long-bodied, short-legged, and perfectly white little wretches, the keeper seemed particularly fond. * * * *

“The routine of Gordon Castle was what each one chose to make it. Between breakfast and lunch, the ladies were generally invisible, and the gentlemen rode or shot, or played billiards, or kept in their rooms. At two o’clock, a dish or two of hot game and a profusion of cold meats were set on the small tables in the dining-room, and every body came in for a kind of lounging half-meal, which occupied perhaps an hour. Thence all adjourned to the drawing-room, under the windows of which were drawn up carriages of all descriptions, with grooms, outriders, footmen, and saddle-horses for gentlemen and ladies. Parties were then made up for driving or riding, and from a pony-chaise to a phaeton-and-four, there was no class of vehicle which was not at your disposal. In ten minutes the carriages were usually all filled, and away they flew, some to the banks of the Spey, or the sea-side, some to the drives in the park, and with the delightful consciousness, that, speed where you would, the horizon scarce limited the possession of your host, and you were everywhere at home. The ornamental gates flying open at your approach, miles distant from the castle; the herds of red-deer trooping away from the sound of wheels in the silent park; the stately pheasants feeding tamely in the immense preserves; the hares scarcely troubling themselves to get out of the length of the whip; the stalking gamekeepers lifting their hats in the dark recesses of the forest,—there was something in this, perpetually reminding you of privileges; which, as a novelty, was far from disagreeable. I could not at the time bring myself to feel, what perhaps would be more poetical and republican, that a ride in the wild and unfenced forest of my own country would have been more to my taste.

“The second afternoon of my arrival, I took a seat in the carriage with Lord A., and we followed the duchess, who drove herself in a pony-chaise, to visit a school on the estate. Attached to a small gothic chapel, a five minutes’ drive from the castle, stood a building in the same style, appropriated to the instruction of the children of the duke’s tenantry. There were a hundred and thirty little creatures, from two years to five or six, and like all infant schools, in these days of improved education, it was an interesting and affecting sight. The last one I had been in, was at Athens, and though I missed here the dark eyes and Grecian faces of the Ægean, I saw health and beauty, of a kind which stirred up more images of home, and promised, perhaps, more for the future. * * * *

“The number at the dinner-table of Gordon Castle was seldom less than thirty; but the company was continually varied by departures and arrivals. No sensation was made by either one or the other. A travelling-carriage dashed up to the door, was disburdened of its load, and drove round to the stables, and the question was seldom asked, ‘Who is arrived?’ You are sure to see at dinner—and an addition of half a dozen to the party, made no perceptible difference in any thing. Leave-takings were managed in the same quiet way. Adieus were made to the duke and duchess, and to no one else, except he happened to encounter the parting guest upon the staircase, or were more than a common acquaintance. In short, in every way the gêne of life seemed weeded out, and if unhappiness or ennui found its way into the castle, it was introduced in the sufferer’s own bosom. For me, I gave myself up to enjoyment with an abandon I could not resist. With kindness and courtesy in every look, the luxuries and comforts of a regal establishment at my freest disposal; solitude when I pleased, company when I pleased,—the whole visible horizon fenced in for the enjoyment of a household, of which I was a temporary portion, and no enemy except time and the gout, I felt as if I had been spirited into some castle of felicity, and had not come by the royal mail-coach at all.”

This is one of the most perfect and graphic descriptions of English aristocratical life in the country, which was ever written. It is, indeed, on the highest and broadest scale, and is not to be equalled by every country gentleman; but in kind and in degree, the same character and spirit extend to all such life, and I have therefore taken the liberty of transcribing Mr. Willis’s sketch as completely as my limits would admit. Nothing, were a volume written on the subject, could bring it more palpably and correctly before the mind of the reader; and I think that if there be a perfection in human life, it is to be found, so far as all the goods of providence and the easy elegances of society can make it so, in the rural life of the English nobility and gentry.

CHAPTER IV.
THE ROUTINE OF COUNTRY SPORTS.

In my last chapter I took a view of the variety given to rural life by the annual visit to town: but if a gentleman have no desire so to vary his existence; if he love the country too well to leave it at all, most plentiful are the resources which offer themselves for pleasantly speeding on the time. If he be attached merely to field sports, not a moment of the whole year but he may fill up with his peculiar enjoyment. Racing, hunting, coursing, shooting, fishing, all offer themselves to his choice; and rural sports, as every thing else in English life, are so systematized; every thing belonging to them is so exactly regulated; all their necessary implements and accessories, are brought to such an admirable pitch of perfection by the advancement of the arts, that the pleasures of the sportsman are rendered complete, and are diffused over every portion of the year. Field sports have long ceased to be followed in that rude and promiscuous manner which they were when forests overrun the greater part of Europe, and hunting was almost necessary to existence. Parties of hunters no longer go out with dogs of various kinds—greyhounds, hounds, spaniels, and terriers, all in leash, as our ancestors frequently did, ready to slip them on any kind of game which might present itself, and with bows also ready to make more sure of their prey. We have no battues, such as are still to be found in some parts of the continent, and which used to be the common mode of hunting in the Highlands, when the beasts of a whole district were driven into a small space, and subjected to a promiscuous slaughter; a scene such as Taylor the water-poet describes himself as witnessing in the Braes of Mar; nor such as those perpetrated by the King of Naples in Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia, in which he killed 5 bears, 1820 boars, 1950 deer, 1145 does, 1625 roebucks, 1121 rabbits, 13 wolves, 17 badgers, 16,354 hares, 354 foxes, 15,350 pheasants, and 12,335 partridges. Such scenes are not to be witnessed in this country. Every field sport is here become a science. Hunting, coursing, shooting, each has its own season, its well-defined bounds, its peculiar horses, dogs, and weapons. Our horses and dogs, by long and anxious attention to the preservation of their specific characters, and to the improvement of their breed, are become pre-eminent, each in their own department. Our sporting nobility and gentry have not contented themselves with becoming thoroughly skilful in every thing relating to field diversions; but have many of them communicated their knowledge through the press to their countrymen, and have thus furnished our libraries with more practical information of this kind than ever was possessed by any one country at any one time; and contributed to make these pursuits as effective, elegant, and attractive as possible. It is not my province to go into the details of any particular sports; for them I refer the reader to Daniel, Beckford, Col. Thornton, Sir John Sebright, Col. Hawker, Tom Oakleigh, Nimrod, and the sporting magazines. My business is to shew how gentlemen may and do spend their time in the country. And in the mere catalogue of out-of-door sports, are there not racing, hunting, coursing, shooting, angling? Hawking once was an elegant addition to this list; but that has nearly fallen into disuse in this country, and may be said to exist only in the practice of Sir John Sebright, and the grand falconer of England, the Duke of St. Albans. Archery too, once the great boast of our forests, and the constant attendant on the hunt, has, as a field exercise, followed hawking. It has of late years been revived and practised by the gentry as a graceful amusement, and an occasion for assembling together at certain periods in the country; but as an adjunct of the field sports it is past for ever. Racing, every one knows, is a matter of intense interest with a great portion of the nobility, gentry, and others; and those who delight in it, know where to find Newmarket, Epsom, Ascot Heath, Doncaster, and other places, often to their cost: almost every county and considerable town, has its course and annual races. These, however, to the country gentleman, unless he be one whose great and costly passion is for breeding and betting on race-horses, are but occasional excitements: the rest run their round of seasons as regularly as the seasons themselves; and place a lover of field sports in the country at any point of the year, and one or more of them are ready for his enjoyment. Is it winter? He has choice of all, except it be angling. Hunting, coursing, shooting, are all in their full season. Hunting, as I have said, is more confined in its range than it was anciently; but it is more regular, less fatiguing, less savage in its character, more complete in its practice and appointments. There is now neither the boar, the bear, nor the wolf, to try the courage of our youth, and stag and buck hunting may be considered as rare and almost local amusements,—but we may quote the words of a great authority as to the position which hunting occupies amongst the rural sports of England. “There is certainly no country in the world, where the sport of hunting on horseback is carried to such a height as in Great Britain at the present day, and where the pleasures of a fox-chase are so well understood, and conducted on such purely scientific principles. It is considered the beau idéal of hunting by those who pursue it. There can be no doubt, that it is infinitely superior to stag-hunting, for the real sportsman can only enjoy that chase, when the deer is sought for, and found like other game which are pursued by hounds. In the case of finding an out-lying fallow-deer, which is unharboured in this manner, great sport is frequently afforded; but this is rarely to be met with in Great Britain: so that fox-hunting is now the chief amusement of the true British sportsman: and a noble one it is—the artifices and dexterity employed by this lively, crafty animal, to avoid the dogs, are worthy of our admiration, as he exhibits more devices for self-preservation than any other beast of the chase. In many parts of this and the sister island, hare-hunting is much followed, but fox-hunters consider it as a sport only fit for women and old men,—but, although it is less arduous than that of the fox-chase, there are charms attached to it which compensate for the hard riding of the other.”

I do not enter here into the question of cruelty in this sport, nor into the other question of injury resulting from it to crops and fences, on which grounds many so strongly object to hunting, and on the former ground, indeed, to all field sports. Lord Byron, for instance, thought hunting a barbarous amusement, fit only for a barbarous country. It is not my intention to undertake the defence of this old English sport from the standing charge against it, we here have only to deal with it as a feature of rural life; and though one cannot say much in praise of its humanity, it cannot be denied that it is a pursuit of a vigorous and exciting character. A fine field of hunters in their scarlet coats, rushing over forest, heath, fence or stream, on noble steeds, and with a pack of beautiful dogs in full cry, is a very picturesque and animating spectacle.

Through the winter, then, up to the very approach of spring, hunting offers whatever charms it possesses; pheasant, woodcock and snipe shooting, in the woods and by the streams, are in all their glory. It is the time for pursuing all manner of wild fowl, in fens and along the sea-coast; and if any one would know what are the eager and adventurous pleasures of that pursuit, let him join some old fowler for a week amongst the reeds of Cambridge, Huntingdon, or Lincolnshire,—now laying his traps and springes, now crouching amongst the green masses of flags and other water plants, or crawling on hands and knees for a shot at teal, widgeon, or wild duck; now visiting the decoys, or shooting right and left amongst the rising and contorting snipes. Or let him read Col. Hawker’s delightful description of swivel shooting on the coasts, the mud-launchers and followers of the sea flocks by night. Those are sports which require a spice of enthusiasm and love of adventure far above the pitch of the ordinary sportsman.

When spring arrives, and warns the shooter to give rest to the creatures of his pursuit, that they may pair, produce, and rear their broods; as he lays down the gun, he can take up the angle. Many a keen and devoted old sportsman, however, never knows when to lay down the gun. Though he will no longer fire at game, he likes through the spring and summer months to carry his gun on his arm through the woods, to knock down what he calls vermin,—stoats, weazels, polecats, jays, magpies, hawks, owls; all those creatures that destroy game, or their young broods, or suck their eggs. He is fond of spying out the nests of partridges and pheasants, and from time to time marking their progress. It is a grand anticipative pleasure to him when, passing along the furrow of the standing corn, his old pointer, or favourite spaniel starts the young birds just able to take the wing, and he counts them over with a silent exultation. He is fond of seeing to the training of his young dogs, of selecting fresh ones, of putting his fowling-pieces and all his shooting gear in order. There are some old sportsmen of my acquaintance, who, during what they call this idle time, have made collections of curious birds and small animals which might furnish some facts to natural history. An old uncle of mine in Derbyshire, who has shot away a fine estate, I scarcely ever recollect to have seen out of doors without his gun. I saw him lately, when in that county, a feeble, worn-out old man, just able to totter about, but still with the gun on his arm. For those, however, who can find it in their hearts to lay aside the gun at the prescribed time, and yet long for rural sports, what can so delightfully fill up the spring and summer as the fishing-rod? There is no rural art, except that of shooting, for which modern science and invention have done so much as angling. Since Izaak Walton gave such an impetus to this taste by his delicious old book, it has gradually assumed a new and fascinating character. A host of contrivances have been expended on fishing tackle. What splendid rods for simple angling, trolling, or fly-fishing, are now offered to the admiring eyes of the amateur! what a multitude of apparatus of one kind or other! what silver fish and endless artificial flies Angling has become widened and exalted in its sphere with the general expansion of knowledge and the improvement of taste. It has associated itself with the pleasures and refinements of literature and poetry. All those charms which worthy Izaak threw round it, have continued to cling to it, and others have grown up around them. The love of nature, the love of travel have intertwined themselves with the love of angling. Angling has thence become, as it were, a new and more attractive pursuit—a matter of taste and science as well as of health and pleasure. It is found that it may not only be followed by the tourist without diverting him from his primal objects, but that it adds most essentially to the delights of a summer excursion. Since Wordsworth and John Wilson set up their “Angler’s Tent” on the banks of Wast-Water, “at the head of that wild and solitary lake, which they had reached by the mountain-path that passes Barn-Moor-Tarn from Eskdale,” making an angling excursion of seven days amongst the mountains of Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland, having “their tent, large panniers filled with its furniture, provisions, etc., loaded upon horses, which, while the anglers, who separated every morning, pursued each his own sport up the torrents, were carried over the mountains to the appointed place, by some lake or stream, where they were to meet again in the evening;” and

that solitary trade,
Mid rural peace in peacefulness pursued,
Through rocky glen, wild moor, and hanging wood,
White flowering meadow, and romantic glade;

since Sir Humphry Davy went angling and philosophising in the mountain tarns, and along the trout and salmon streams not only of Scotland and Ireland, but of France and Switzerland, the enthusiasm for angling has grown into a grand and expansive passion. We have our “Anglers in Wales,” our “Anglers in Ireland;” Stephen Oliver has flourished his lines over the streams of the north, Jesse over the gentle and majestic Thames. The only wonder is, that, as our countrymen walk to and fro through all known regions of the earth, we do not hear of anglers in the Danube—the Ister—the Indus—the Joliba,—of trolling in La Plata, and fly-fishing in South Africa and Australia. All that will come in its own good time: meanwhile let us remind our country friends of the further blessings which await them, even should all the rapid streams of our mountain rivers and rivulets, Loch Leven trout, Loch Fine herrings, and salmon pulled flouncing from the crystal waters of the Teith or the Shannon, to be crimped and grilled by most delicious art, satiate them before the summer is over. The 12th of August approaches! the gun is roused from its slumber—the dogs are howling in ecstasy on their release from the kennel—the heather is burst into all its crimson splendour on the moors and the mountains, and grouse-shooting is at hand once more!

That sentence is enough to make a sportsman start to his feet if it were but whispered to him in his deepest after-dinner doze. In “The Book of the Seasons” I asserted that sportsmen felt the animating influence of nature and its beauty in their pursuits. For that passage many have been the gentle lectures of the tender-hearted; but that it was a true passage has been shewn by the thanks which many sportsmen have given me for that simple vindication, and by the repeated quotation of the whole article in their books. That they do feel it, is plainly shewn in many papers of the sporting magazines; but nowhere more vividly than in “The Oakleigh Shooting Code.” If the unction with which the paper on grouse-shooting is written in that book were more diffused through works of the like nature, vain would be all arguments to check the love of shooting. The feeling on this subject has been evidenced by the avidity with which that part of the book has been quoted far and wide. But the spirit of the picturesque is not more prominent in these chapters than in the description of Oakleigh Hall, and of the “wide-ranging treeless view of the smooth-turfed limestone hills, the white rocks breaking out in patches, so characteristic of Derbyshire.”

But we are pausing on our way to the Highlands; and surely nothing can be so inspiring and exciting in the whole circle of sporting scenes as a trip to the moors and mountains of the north, in the height of summer—in the beauty of summer weather, and in the full beauty of the scenery itself. If the season is fine—the roads are dry—the walks are dry—the bogs are become, many of them, passable, the heather is in full bloom, the fresh air of the mountains, or the waters in sailing thither, the rapid changes of scene, the novel aspects of life and nature in progressing onward, by the carriage, the railway, the steamer, with all their varying groups of tourists and pleasure-seekers, of men of business and men of idleness, are full of enjoyment. To the man from the rich monotonous Lowlands, from the large town, from the heart of the metropolis perhaps, from the weary yoke of business, public or private, of law, of college study, of parliament and committees, what can be more penetrating and delicious than the breathing of the fresh buoyant air, the pleasant flitting of the breeze, the dash of sunny waters, the aspect of mountains and moors in all their shadow and gloom, or in their brightness as they rise in their clear still beauty into the azure heavens, or bask broad and brown in the noon-sun? There go the happy sportsmen; seated on the deck of some fast-sailing steamer, with human groups around them; they are fast approaching the “land of the mountain and the flood.” They already seem to tread the elastic turf, to smell the heather bloom, and the peat fire of the Highland hut; to climb the moory hill, to hear the thunder of the linn, or pace the pebbly shore of the birch-skirted lake. They have left dull scenes or dry studies behind, and a volume of Walter Scott’s novels is in their hands, living with all the character and traditions of the mountain-land before them. Well then, is it not a blessed circumstance that our poets and romancers have kindled the spirit of these things in the heart of our countrymen, that such places lie within our own island, and that science has so quickened our transit to them? Let us just note a few of the symptoms which shew us that this memorable 12th of August is at hand. In the market towns you see the country sportsman hastening along the streets, paying quick visits to his gunsmith, ammunition dealer, tailor, draper, etc. He is getting all his requisites together. His dogs are at his heels. Then you see him already invested in his jacket and straw hat, driving off in his gig, phaeton, or other carriage, with keeper or companion, and perhaps a couple of dogs stowed away with him. You see the keeper and the dog-cart on their way too. As you get northward these signs thicken. In large towns, as Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, you see keeper-like looking men, with pointers and setters for sale tied up to some palisade, or lamp-post, at the corner of a street. But woe to those who have to purchase dogs under such circumstances. It is ten to one but they are grievously gulled; or if they should chance to stumble upon a tolerable dog, there is not time for that mutual knowledge to grow up which should exist between the sportsman and his companion of the field. He that sees beforehand his trip to the hills, should beforehand have all in readiness: he who on a summer ramble is smitten with a sudden desire of grouse-shooting, must however, do the best he can.

When you pass into Scotland, the signals of the time grow more conspicuous. In the newspapers, you see everywhere advertisements of Highland tracts to be let as shooting-grounds. When you get into the Highlands themselves, you find in all the inns maps of the neighbouring estates, divided into shooting-grounds for letting. It is very probable that the income derived from this source by the Highland proprietors frequently far exceeds the rental of the same estates for the grazing of sheep and cattle. The waters and the heaths seem to be the most profitable property of a great part of the Highlands. Almost every stream and loch is carefully preserved and let as a trout or salmon fishery, many of them for enormous sums; and so far is this carried, that sportsmen who are not inclined to pay eighty or a hundred pounds a-year for a shooting ground, complain that Ireland is the only country now for shooting in any degree of freedom. Sometimes several gentlemen join at a shooting ground; and it is a picturesque sight to see them, and their dogs and keepers, drawing towards their particular locations as the day approaches.

On the 10th of August, 1836, we sailed up the Grand Caledonian Canal from Fort William to Inverness in the steam-packet with a large party of these gentlemen. Of their number, principally military men—

Captains, and colonels, and men at arms;

some notion may be formed from the fact that we had on board upwards of seventy dogs, mostly beautiful setters; a perfect pyramid of gun-cases was piled on the deck, and dog-carts and keepers completed the scene.

One of the singular features of English life at the present moment is the swarming of summer tourists in all interesting quarters. In these Highland regions the consequent effect is often truly ludicrous. Into one miserable village, or one poor solitary inn, pour, day after day, the summer through, from seventy to a hundred people. The impossibility of such a place accommodating such a company is the first thing which strikes every one. The moment, therefore, that the vessel touches the quay, out rushes the whole throng, and a race commences to the house or village to secure beds for the night. Such is the impetus of the rush that the first arrivers are frequently driven by the “pressure from without” up the stairs to the very roof. A scene of the most laughable confusion is exhibited. All are clamouring for beds; nobody can be heard or attended to; and generally all who can, burst into rooms which are not locked up, and take forcible possession. Such scenes, any one who has gone up this canal, or to the Western Isles must have seen,—at Oban, at Tobermory, and at Inverness, which last place boasts three inns, and where, on our arrival with a hundred fellow-passengers, we found three hundred others had just landed from a London steamer! Our sportsmen, however, who were well aware of the statistics of the north, had written beforehand, and secured bed-rooms at all the sleeping-places, which were duly locked up against their arrival, and they sate very composedly to witness the race of worse-informed mortals.

On this occasion a very characteristic contrast was presented between the sportsmen and a number of students who were on board at the time. These students, many of whom spend the college recess in pedestrianizing through the Highlands, have a character almost as peculiar to themselves as the German Bürschen. In twos and threes, with their knapsacks on their backs, they may be seen rambling on, wherever there is fine scenery or spots of note to be visited. They step on board a packet at one place, and go off at another, steering away into the hills; ready to take up their quarters at such abode as may offer—the road-side inn or the smoky hut of the Gael. Wherever you see them, they are all curiosity and enthusiasm; all on fire with the sublime and beautiful—athirst for knowledge; historical, antiquarian, traditionary, botanical, geological—anything in the shape of knowledge. They are the first to climb the hill, to reach the waterfall, to crowd round every spot of tragic interest; everywhere they go agog with imagination, and everywhere they lament that they do not feel adequately, the power, and beauty, and grandeur of the objects of their attention. Such a group we had on board. On the other hand, the sportsmen had but one object, which absorbed all their interests and faculties. They cared not at that moment for the Fall of Foyers, saw scarcely the splendid mountains and glens around. Their souls were in the brown hills of their shooting grounds—the fever of the 12th of August was upon them. They kept together, talking of guns, dogs, grouse, roebucks; all their conversation was larded and illustrated with the phraseology of their own favourite pursuit. They were, many of them, clad in a close jacket and trousers of shepherd’s tartan, with their telescope slung at their backs. They seemed to look on the students as so many hair-brained and romantic striplings—the students on them, as so many creatures of the chase. As we proceeded, the fiery Nimrods were, one after another, put out at the opening of beautiful glens, and at the foot of wild mountains where their huts lay, and the vessel received a considerable accession of silence by the departure of their keepers, who, having found a Highland piper on board, got up a dance in the steerage cabin, and kept that end of the vessel pretty well alive both day and night. Having thus brought them to their grounds, there can be no better narrator of what passes there than Thomas Oakleigh.

“On the 11th of August the sportsman arrives at his shooting quarters; probably some isolated tavern, ‘old as the hills,’—if such a house as the grouse-shooter occasionally locates himself in, in the northern or midland counties of England, or in Scotland, where oatcake and peat supply the place of bread and fuel, can be called a tavern. The place, humble in character, has been the immemorial resort of sportsmen in August, although during the rest of the year, sometimes many months elapse ere a customer, save some itinerant salesman calling for his mug of beer, ‘darkens the door.’ * * * At the house will be found all the keepers, and tenters, and poachers, and young men from the country round, assembled, amounting in the whole to not more than some eight or ten persons, all knowing ones, each anxious to display his knowledge of the number and locality of the broods, but each differing, wide as the poles asunder, in his statement, except on four points, in which all are agreed, viz.—That the hatching season has been finer than was ever known before! That the broods are larger and more numerous than were ever counted before! That the birds are heavier and stronger than were ever seen before! and that they will, on the following day, lie better than they ever did on any previous opening day in the recollection of the oldest person present! Each successive season being, in their idea, more propitious than its precursor! Anxiety and expectation are now arrived at a climax. At night, the blithe and jocund peasantry mingle with their superiors: their pursuits are for once something akin. In the field-sports they can sympathize together: the peasant and the peer associate; the plough-boy and the squire talk familiarly together; it is the privilege of the former, his prescriptive right. The circling cup, and lighthearted and hilarious laugh promiscuously go round! This night distinctions are unknown—and would that it were oftener so! * * * Long before midnight, all who can obtain beds retire, though not an eye is drowsy. The retainers lie on sofas, elbow-chairs, or whatever else presents itself; but sleep is almost a stranger during the night. The soldier before battle, is not more anxious as to the result of the morrow, than is the sportsman on the night of the 11th of August! Morning dawns, ‘and heavily with mists comes on the day.’ The occupiers of benches and chairs are first on the alert: the landlady is called; breakfast is prepared—the dogs are looked at; all is tumult, noise, and confusion. Reckless must he be that can rest longer in bed—‘the cootie moor-cocks crowsely crow;’ breakfast is hastily dispatched—next is heard the howling and yelping of dogs, the cracking of whips, the snapping of locks, the charging, and flashing, and firing of guns, and every other note of preparation. The march is sounded, and away they wind for the heather and hills, true peep-o’-day boys, far, far from the busy, money-getting world, to breathe empyreal air; to enjoy a sport that should be monopolized by princes—if, indeed, princes could be found deserving of such a monopoly! Every person the shooter meets with seems this day to have thrown off his sordid cloak, and to be divested of those meaner passions which render life miserable: all are now warm, open-hearted, frank, sincere, and obliging. The sportsman’s shooting-dress is a sibboleth, which introduces him alike to his superiors, to his fellows, and his inferiors: an acquaintance is formed at first sight: there are no distant looks, no coldness, no outpouring of arrogance, or avarice, or pride; but a happy rivalry exists, to eclipse each other in the number and size of birds killed—the chief object of emulation being to kill the finest old cock. Let us be understood to express that this happy state of things subsists only so long as the shooter’s peregrinations are circumscribed by the limits of his own or friend’s manor. The moment he becomes a borderer, a very different reception awaits him! To the sportsman in training, full of health and strength, and well appointed, it is of little consequence whether there be game or not. The inspiriting character of the sport, and the wild beauty of the scenery, so different from what he is elsewhere in the habit of contemplating, hold out a charm that dispels fatigue! He feels not the drudgery. To him the hills are lovely in every aspect; whether beneath a hot, autumnal sun, with not a cloud to intercept the torrid beam, or beneath the dark canopy of thunder-clouds; whether in the frosty morn or in the dewy eve—whether, when through the clear atmosphere he surveys, as it were in a map, the countries that lie stretched around and beneath him, or when he wanders darkly on, amidst eternal mists that roll continuously past him—still a charm pervades the hills. The sun shines brighter, and the storm rages more furiously than in the valleys! The very sterility pleases: and to him who has been brought thither by the rapid means of travelling now adopted, from some bustling mart of trade or vortex of fashion, the novelty of loneliness is agreeably exciting! The stillness that reigns around is as wonderful to him as the solidity of land to the stranded sailor! Scarcely is there a change of scene—stillness and solitude, hill and ravine, sky and heather, everywhere magnificent, the outline everywhere bold, and where the view terminates amid rocks and crags, frequently sublime! At noonday, near some rocky summit, perchance on the shepherd’s stone, the shooter seats himself, and shares his last sandwich with his panting dogs. We will suppose him to be on the boundary of the muir-lands: on one hand he sees an unbounded expanse of heathery hills, by no means monotonous if he will look upon them with the eye of a painter, for there is every shade of yellow, green, brown, and purple,—the last is the prevailing colour at this season, the heather being in bloom: nor are the hills monotonous, if he looks at them with the eye of a sportsman, for by this time (we suppose him to have been shooting all the morning) he will have performed many feats, or at any rate will have met with several adventures, and the ground before him is the field of his fame. He now looks with interest on many a rock, and cliff, and hill, which lately appeared but as one of so many ‘crags, knolls, and mounds confusedly hurled!’ He contemplates the site of his achievements, as a general surveys a field of battle during an interval of strife; the experience of the morning has taught him a lesson, and he plans a fresh campaign for the afternoon, or the morrow, or probably the next season, should the same hills be again destined to be the scene of his exploits. The shooter looks down on the other hand from his rocky summit, and, in the bright relief, through the white rents in the clouds, sees the far-off meadows and hamlets, the woods, the rivers, and the lake. He rises, and renews his task. The invigorating influence of the bracing wind on the heights, lends the sportsman additional strength—he puts forth every effort, every nerve is strained—he feels an artificial glow after nature is exhausted, and returns to the cot where he had previously spent a sleepless night, to enjoy his glass of grog, and such a snooze as the citizen never knew!”

This is a graphic and true picture of the outset of grouse-shooting; but it is but one amongst many of the exciting situations and picturesque positions which this fine sport presents. There is a wide difference, too, between the grouse-shooting of the north of England and of the Highlands. On the English moors, the majority of shooters who assemble there, are the friends or acquaintances of the proprietors, or of their friends and acquaintances, who have received invitations, or procured the favour to shoot for a day or two at the opening of the season. The outbreak on the morning of the 12th, is therefore proportionably multitudinous and bustling. The throng of the people on the preceding evening, crowded into the inns and cottages in the neighbourhood where the best shooting lies, is often amazing. Many sportsmen, who on other occasions would think scorn to enter such a hovel, or jostle in such a crowd, may be seen waiting in patient endurance, in a situation in which a beggar would not envy them. Others will be seen stretched on their cloaks on the floor, while their dogs are occupying their beds, or the soft bottom of a huge old chair; their great anxiety being, to have their dogs fresh and able for the coming day. At the faintest peep of dawn, which is about three o’clock at that season, loud is the sound of guns on all sides, going off farther and farther in the distance. At noon, on some picturesque and breezy hill, you may see a large party congregated to luncheon, where provisions and drink have been conveyed by appointment. There, ten or a dozen sportsmen seated on the ground, all warm in body and mind—their dogs watching eagerly for their share of the feast, which is thrown them with liberal hand—their guns reared against some rock—their game thrown picturesquely on the moorland turf—Flibbertigibbets, with their asses who have brought up the baskets of provisions, the keg of beer, and bottles of porter, are running about and acting the waiters in a style of genuine originality; while keepers and markers are at once lunching and keeping an eye on the dogs, lest they are too troublesome to their masters; who are all talking together with inconceivable ardour of their individual achievements. The situation, the mixture of men and animals, of personages and costumes, all go to make up a striking picture. On the English moorlands, however, grouse-shooting is but as it were a brilliant and passing flash. As the enjoyment of the sport is generally a matter of grace and friendship, and is sought by numbers who can only devote to the excursion, at the best, a few days, it is a scene of animation and havoc for a week or ten days, and then its glory is over. During this time, however, the keepers on many estates make a rich harvest, by presents from gentlemen for attendance and guidance to the best haunts of the game—by the loan of dogs at good interest to such as have not come well provided, or have met with accidents, or whose dogs, as is sometimes the case, unused to this kind of sport and scenery, have bolted and disappeared at the first general discharge of guns; and by furnishing, sub rosâ, grouse at a guinea a brace to certain luckless braggadocios, who have boastingly promised to various friends at home plenty of game from the moors; and have not been able to ruffle a single feather! In the Highlands the scene is different. The grounds are more generally rented by individuals or parties; they are wider and wilder, and both from their extent and distance from the populous districts of England are more thinly scattered with shooters. There, some of the sportsmen take their families to their cottages on their shooting-ground, and on which they have probably bestowed some trouble and expense, to render them sufficiently comfortable and convenient for a few months’ occasional summer sojourn, and what in nature can afford a more delicious change from the ordinary course and place of life? Up far amongst the wild mountains and moorlands, amid every fresh and magnificent object—amid fairyland glens of birch and hills of pine, the sight of crystal, rapid, sunny streams, and the sound of waterfalls, in the lands of strange and startling traditions. To intelligent children full of the enjoyment of life and healthful curiosity, in such scenery every thing is wonderful and delightful; to ladies of taste, such a life for a brief season must be equally pleasant. There are some ladies, indeed, of the highest rank, who are in the regular habit of spending a certain portion of every year in the Highlands; and one in particular, of ducal rank, who at that season rambles far and wide amongst the cottages and the beautiful scenery of her native hills, telling her daughters, that if they there indulge in English luxuries, they must prepare them themselves,—such is the simplicity of her mountain residence and establishment; and they take their Cook’s Oracle, and wonderfully enjoy the change. The language and costume of the inhabitants are those of a foreign country; every object has its novelty, and the little elegancies of books, music, and furniture, which can be conveyed to such an abode, strike all the more from the stern nature without. Then there is the finest fishing in the lochs and mountain-streams, the most delightful sailing in many places, and in the woods there are the shy roebuck and sometimes the red-deer to be pursued. The grouse and black-cock shooting season is, therefore, longer and steadier there; but the full perfection of its enjoyment is to be found, perhaps, after all, only by the happy mortal who makes one of the select party collected at one of the great Highland houses of the aristocracy, where the best shooting, every requisite of horses, dogs, attendants, etc., are furnished—and where, after the fatigues of the day, the sportsman returns to his own clean room, to an excellent dinner, music, and refined society. But, amid all these seductions, nothing will make the thorough English sportsman forget the first of September. Back he comes, and enters on that regular succession of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, snipe, and wild-fowl shooting, of hunting and coursing, which diversify and fill up the autumn and winter of English rural life. To these pleasures then we leave him.

A WORD WITH THE TOO SENSITIVE.

I have not attempted to defend the hunter, the courser, or even the shooter, in the preceding chapter, from the charge of cruelty which is perpetually directed against them—they are a sturdy, and now a very intelligent people; often numbering amongst them many of our principal senators, authors, and men of taste, and very capable of vindicating themselves; but I must enact the shield-bearer for a moment, for that very worthy and much-abused old man, Izaak Walton, and the craft which he has made so fashionable. Spite even of Lord Byron’s jingle about the hook and gullet, and a stout fish to pull it, they may say what they will of the old man’s cruelty and inconsistency—the death of a worm, a frog, or a fish, is the height of his infliction, and what is that to the ten thousand deaths of cattle, sheep, lambs, fish, and fowl of all kinds, that are daily perpetrated for the sustenance of these same squeamish cavillers! They remind me of a delicate lady, at whose house I was one day, and on passing the kitchen door at ten in the morning, saw a turkey suspended by its heels, and bleeding from its bill, drop by drop. Supposing it was just in its last struggles from a recent death-wound, I passed on, and found the lady lying on her sofa overwhelmed in tears over a most touching story. I was charmed with her sensibility; and the very delightful conversation which I held with her, only heightened my opinion of the goodness of her heart. On accidentally passing by the same kitchen door in the afternoon, six hours afterwards, I beheld, to my astonishment, the same turkey suspended from the same nail, still bleeding, drop by drop, and still giving an occasional flutter with its wings! Hastening to the kitchen, I inquired of the cook, if she knew that the turkey was not dead. “O yes, sir,” she replied, “it won’t be dead, may-happen, these two hours. We always kill turkeys that way, it so improves their colour; they have a vein opened under the tongue, and only bleed a drop at a time!” “And does your mistress know of this your mode of killing turkeys?” “O yes, bless you sir, it’s our regular way; missis often sees ’em as she goes to the gardens—and she says sometimes, ‘Poor things! I don’t like to see ’em, Betty; I wish you would hang them where I should not see ’em!’” I was sick! I was dizzy! It was the hour of dinner, but I walked quietly away,

And ne’er repassed that bloody threshold more!

I say, what is Izaak Walton’s cruelty to this, and to many another such perpetration on the part of the tender and sentimental? What is it to the grinding and oppression of the poor that is every day going on in society,—to the driving of wheels and the urging of steam-engines, matched against whose iron power thousands daily waste their vital energies? What is it to the laying on of burdens of expense and trouble by the exactions of law, of divinity, of custom,—burdens grievous to be borne, and which they who impose them, will not so much as touch with one of their little fingers?

They sit at home and turn an easy wheel,
And set sharp racks to work to pinch and peel.—John Keats.

These things are done and suffered by human beings, and then go the very doers of these things, and cry out mightily against the angler for pricking the gristle of a fish’s mouth!

I do not mean to advocate cruelty—far from it! I would have all men as gentle and humane as possible; nor do I argue that because the world is full of cruelty, it is any reason that more cruelty should be tolerated: but I mean to say, that it is a reason why there should not be so much permission to the greater evils, and so much clamour against the less. Is there more suffering caused by angling than by taking fishes by the net? Not a thousandth,—not a ten thousandth part! Where one fish is taken with a hook, it may be safely said that a thousand are taken with the net: for daily are the seas, lakes, and rivers swept with nets; and cod, haddock, halibut, salmon, crabs, lobsters, and every species of fish that supplies our markets, are gathered in thousands and ten thousands—to say nothing of herrings and pilchards by millions. Over these there is no lamentation; and yet their sufferings are as great—for the suffering does not consist so much in the momentary puncture of a hook, as in the dying for lack of their native element. Then go these tender-hearted creatures and feast upon turtles that have come long voyages nailed to the decks of ships in living agonies; upon crabs, lobsters, prawns, and shrimps, that have been scalded to death; and thrust oysters alive into fires; and fry living eels in pans, and curse poor anglers before their gods for cruel monsters, and bless their own souls for pity and goodness, forgetting all the fish-torments they have inflicted!

“Ay, but”—they turn round upon you suddenly with what they deem a decisive and unanswerable argument—“Ay, but they cannot approve of making the miseries of sentient creatures a pleasure.” What! is there no pleasure in feasting upon crabs that have been scalded, and eels that have been fried alive? In sucking the juices of an oyster, that has gaped in fiery agony between the bars of your kitchen grate? But the whole argument is a sophism and a fallacy. Nobody does seek a pleasure, or make an amusement of the misery of a living creature. The pleasure is in the pursuit of an object, and the art and activity by which a wild creature is captured, and in all those concomitants of pleasant scenery and pleasant seasons that enter into the enjoyment of rural sports;—the suffering is only the casual adjunct, which you would spare to your victim if you could, and which any humane man will make as small as possible. And over what, after all, do these very sensitive persons lament? Over the momentary pang of a creature, which forms but one atom in a living series, every individual of which is both pursuing and pursued, is preying, or is preyed upon. The fish is eagerly pursuing the fly, one fish is pursuing the other, and so it is through the whole chain of living things; and this is the order and system established by the very centre and principle of love, by the beneficent Creator of all life. The too sensitively humane, will again exclaim—“Yes, this is right in the inferior animals: it is their nature, and they only follow the impulse which their Maker has given them.” True; but what is right in them, is equally right in man;—the argument applies with double force in his case. For, is there no such impulse implanted in him? Let every sportsman answer it; let the history of the world answer it; let the heart of every nine-tenths of the human race answer it. Yes, the very fact that we do pursue such sports, and enjoy them, is an irrefragable answer. The principle of chase and taking of prey, which is impressed on almost all living things, from the minutest insect to the lion of the African desert, is impressed with double force on man. By the strong dictates of our nature, by the very words of the Holy Scriptures, every creature is given us for food; our dominion over them, is made absolute. The amiable Cowper asserted that dogs would not pursue game, if they were not taught to do so. We admit the excellent nature of the man, but every day proves that, in this instance, he was talking beyond his knowledge. Every one who knows anything of dogs, knows, that if you bring them up in a town, and keep them away from the habits of their own class to their full growth, the moment they get into the country they will pursue each their peculiar game, with the utmost avidity, and after their own manner. There is then, unquestionably, an instinctive propensity in one animal to prey upon another—in man pre-eminently so—and it is not the work of wisdom to quench this tendency, but to follow it with all possible gentleness and humanity.

CHAPTER V.
SCIENTIFIC FARMING.

Res rustica, sine dubitatione, proxima, et quasi consanguinea Sapientiæ est. Columella De Re Rustica.

Oh, blessed, who drinks the bliss that Hymen yields,
And plucks life’s roses in his quiet fields.—Ebenezer Elliot.

There may be a difference of opinion as to the strict utility or wisdom of the pursuits noticed in the last chapter;—of the excellence and rationality of those which form the subject of this, there can be none. Nothing can be more consonant to nature, nothing more delightful, nothing more beneficial to the country, or more worthy of any man, than the Georgical occupations which form so prominent a feature in the rural life of England. Whether a country gentleman seek profit or pleasure in them, he can, at any time, find them. While he is increasing the value of his estate, he is in the midst of health, peace, and a series of operations which have now become purely scientific, and have called in to their accomplishment various other sciences and arts. In every age of the world agricultural pursuits have formed the delight of the greatest nations and the noblest men. Some of the most illustrious kings and prophets of Israel were taken from the fold or the plough. David and Elisha are great names in the history of rural affairs. King Uzziah “built towers in the desert, and digged many wells, for he had much cattle both in the low country and in the plains; husbandmen also, and vinedressers in the mountains, and in Carmel, for he loved husbandry.” How delightful are the associations which the literature of Greece and Rome has thrown around country affairs! Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus—how elysian are the glimpses they give us into rural life! how simple, how peaceful, how picturesque! Laertes, that venerable old monarch, pruning his vines, and fetching young stocks from the woods for his fences. Eumeus, at his rustic lodge, entertaining his prince and his king. Hesiod himself, wandering at the feet of Helicon, less impressed with the sublimity of the poet than with the spirit of the husbandman! He shews us the very infancy of agriculture:

Forget not when you sow the grain, to mind
That a boy follows with a rake behind;
And strictly charge him, as you drive, with care
The seeds to cover, and the birds to scare.

Works and Days, B. 2.

The harrow, an implement well known to King David, for he put the subjected Ammonites under it, was unknown then in Greece! They raked in the grain. That was but the second stage in the progress of tillage; the first undoubtedly being that in which their plough was a pointed stick, and their harrow a bush; as the most ancient drawing of hay-forks shews that they were forked sticks cut from the thicket. But to leave those primitive times of Greece,—there is no nation that at once acquired so vast a military renown and yet retained such a passion for the peaceful pursuits of agriculture as Rome. Nothing is so soon familiarized to the mind of the school-boy as the fact of their generals, dictators, and emperors tilling their own lands—leaving them with reluctance for state honours, and retiring to them with gladness to end their days in meditative tranquillity. Cicero tells us that couriers were first introduced by them, to run between the capitol and their farms, that they themselves might leave them only on most important occasions. Almost every one of their writers on rural affairs, whose works have reached us, were men of distinction in the state. Varro was consul; Cato, the most remarkable man of his time, filled the highest offices; Columella and Palladius were men of note; and Pliny, a patrician officer, was governor of Spain. But what is more remarkable even is, that such men as Virgil, Horace, and Cicero, men of imaginative genius, and so involved in court life, or the business of government, should be such passionate lovers of rural concerns. Everyone knows how their writings overflow with the praises of country life, and what delight they took in their farms and villas. Cicero seems as though he could never have done with telling us of the pleasure he took in farming. “I might expatiate,” he says, “on the beauty of verdant groves and meadows, on the charming aspects of vineyards and olive-yards, but to say all in one word, there cannot be a more pleasing, or a more profitable scene than that of a well-cultivated farm. In my opinion, indeed, no kind of occupation is more fraught with happiness, not only as the business of husbandry is of singular utility to mankind, but, as I have said, being attended with its own peculiar pleasures. I will add too, as a further recommendation, and let it restore me to the good graces of the voluptuous, that it supplies both the table and the altar with the greatest variety and abundance. Accordingly, the magazines of the skilful and industrious farmer are plentifully stored with wine and oil, with milk, cheese, and honey; as his yards abound with poultry, and his fields with flocks and herds of kids, lambs, and porkets. The garden also furnishes him with an additional source of delicacies, in allusion to which the farmers pleasantly call a certain piece of ground allotted to that particular use, their dessert. I must not omit, likewise, that in the intervals of their more important business, and in order to heighten the relish of the rest, the sports of the field claim a share of their amusements. * * * Of country occupations I profess myself a warm admirer. They are pleasures perfectly consistent with every degree of advanced years, as they approach the nearest of all others to those of the purely philosophical kind. They are derived from observing the nature and properties of their own earth, which yields a ready obedience to the cultivator’s industry, and returns with interest what he deposits in her charge.”—De Senectute.

He then goes on to tell us what delight he took in the cultivation of the vine; in watching the springing and progress of corn; the green blade pushing forth, shooting into a knotted stem, nourished and supported by the fibres of the root, terminated in the ear in which the grain is lodged in regular order, and defended from the depredations of birds by its bearded spikes. He tells us that he could name numbers of his most distinguished friends and neighbours, and some of them at very advanced ages, who take such interest in all that is going on at their farms, that they will be present at every important agricultural operation—many of them engaged in improvements of which they will see neither the benefit nor the end. “And what,” says he, “do these noble husbandmen, when they are asked for what purpose they dig and plant, reply,—‘In obedience to the immortal gods, by whose bountiful providence we received these fields from our ancestors, and whose will it is that we should deliver them down with improvement to posterity!’” And this generous and high sense of duty it was which animated the Romans during the better portion of their republic, and kept alive their virtue and their simplicity of life, so far as to give them power to despise wealth, and to command the fortunes of other men. Cicero is delighted with this noble principle, and he reverts with enthusiasm to the picture of Manlius Curius, who, after having conquered the Samnites, the Sabines, and even Pyrrhus himself, passed the honourable remainder of his age in cultivating his farm. He adds, “I can never behold his villa without reflecting with the highest degree of admiration both on the singular moderation of his mind, and the general simplicity of the age in which he flourished. Here it was, while sitting by his fireside, that he nobly rejected the gold which was offered him on the part of the Samnites, and rejected it with this memorable saying, ‘that he placed his glory, not on the abundance of his own wealth, but in commanding those amongst whom it abounded.’” With equal exultation he refers to the enthusiasm into which Xenophon in his treatise of Œconomics breaks forth in the praise of agriculture, and relates the interview of Lysander, the Spartan ambassador, with Cyrus the younger, as told by Socrates to his friend Critobulus, in which Cyrus assures Lysander that all the trees, shrubs, etc., which he admired in his garden, were planted by his own hand.

But if such were the charms which agriculture had for the Roman nobility, how much greater ought it to possess for the nobles and gentlemen of England! Amid all the advantages and recreations which have been pointed out in the preceding chapters as surrounding the country life of modern England, that of scientific farming is certainly one of the greatest. It is a pursuit full of interest and variety, at once natural, philosophical, and dignified. It is difficult to imagine a man of wealth and education more usefully or honourably employed than in directing the culture and improvement of his estate. Agriculture is now become, indeed, as Cicero termed it in his day, “the nearest of all employments to the purely philosophical kind.” It is a science which requires a first-rate education to prosecute it to its full capability, to make the other arts and sciences of modern times bear upon it, and co-operate with it, so as to add something to its progression, or even to apply beneficially the knowledge of its already established principles and practices.[1] It is no longer an occupation which requires a man to forego the refined pleasures of society, to bury himself amid woods and wildernesses in some obscure hamlet far from the enjoyments and intelligence of the world. As we have already seen, locate himself where he will in these islands, the arts, the elegances, the news and knowledge of civilized life, will penetrate to him by swift agencies, and give him all the real advantages of the city in the peace and fulness of his retirement. And what a noble art is agriculture now become! Look at the manner it is now practised by the most skilful of its professors. Let any one just turn over the leaves of Mr. Loudon’s Encyclopædia of Agriculture, and trace the progress of its implements only, from the plough of the ancients in the shape of a mere pick, to the almost endless machines which the active brains of men and their advancing knowledge of mechanics have given to the scientific farmer. Let any one turn to the list of engravings of farming apparatus in the same excellent work, amounting to about 300, and he will obtain some idea of the amount of science and invention now devoted to the use of the agriculturist. There are no men who have availed themselves of the progress of the arts and of general knowledge more than they. Mechanics, chemistry, hydraulics, steam, all have been seized upon, to develope the principles, or facilitate the operations of agriculture. Within the last century the strides which have been made in this interesting department of knowledge are admirable. The Netherlands may be said to have been the mother of our modern agriculture—Scotland its nurse. Tull’s system of horse-hoeing and drill husbandry has been introduced by Dawson, and has brought after it a numerous train of drills, dibbling-machines, horse-hoes, ploughs, rollers, scufflers, scarifiers, watering-machines, brakes, drill-harrows, etc., which we now see almost everywhere where the old system of plain ploughing, harrowing, and broad-cast sowing prevailed to the infinite loss of seed and growth of weeds. Then comes the thrashing machine invented by Menzies, and improved by Meikle from stage to stage, successively adapted to horses, wind, water, and eventually the giant power of steam, thus giving to the operations of the barn a rapidity equal to the skill and neatness displayed in the field. The scientific genius of Sir Humphry Davy, Thompson, Fourcroy, Parmentier, Kirwan, Gay Lussac, and many other eminent chemists, have been employed to investigate more accurately the real nature of soils and manures, and a vast increase of productive power has been the result. Bones, a source of fertility till of late entirely wasted, have done wonders; rape-dust, malt-dust, oil, fish, salt, wood and peat ashes, soot, gypsum, and many other substances, have been made the active agents of human subsistence. The best mixture of crops has been determined by numerous experiments; and the benefits of stall-feeding clearly demonstrated. Mangel-würzel, trifolium incarnatum—a plant which from its rich crimson hue would be an ornament of our fields even were it not a profitable production—and other vegetables, have been added to that plenteous growth of clover, dills, lucerne, rape, turnips, etc., with which modern tillage has enriched both summer and winter stalls. The improvement of the breed of cattle and sheep by Bakewell of Dishly, and the Culleys; the growth of finer and better wools by the introduction and crossing with the Merino by Lord Somerville and others, have been as remarkable as the superior cultivation of the soil. The science of draining has found devotees equally ardent, and has produced the most striking consequences. In many instances the mere act of draining has quadrupled the produce of land. In the weald of Kent, land which produced only a rental of five shillings an acre, has been raised by this process to five-and-twenty. And all these objects have been watched over, canvassed, and stimulated by the establishment of agricultural societies, agricultural journals and newspapers, and ploughing matches. Agricultural associations are now to be found in almost every county, and in different districts of the same county, which offer premiums on the best specimens of horses, cattle, and sheep; the best ploughing, and the most steady and industrious farm and household servants. It is a new feature in rural life, to see the whole farming population of a district hastening on a given day, gentlemen, farmers, and farm-servants all in their best array, to some one spot where the cattle are shewn, the ploughing is done, the prizes are awarded by umpires chosen from the most skilful, and the different parties then going to a good dinner, and a long talk and hearty toasting of all the interests of agriculture.

[1] This education is now likely to be extended to the great body of farmers. In Ireland, at Templemoyle, a college is established where the sons of farmers are instructed in every branch of science which can enable them to pursue agriculture successfully, while they daily work certain hours on the farm attached, thus making a familiar practical acquaintance with all the best processes of cultivation under the ablest professors. Similar colleges are also contemplated for England.

It is really too, as curious to see on our scientific farms the vast variety of implements and machines which these causes have produced;—ploughs—about a dozen and a half swing-ploughs, and upwards of a dozen wheel-ploughs of different constructions, and by different patentees; harrows, drills, cultivators. Every species of soil and crop has its peculiar apparatus; in the field and the farm-yard; for getting seed into the ground, clearing and dressing when there, for thrashing it out and cleaning it for market; for sowing peas, beans, turnips, carrots, parsnips, etc., for chopping, slicing, and preparing them for cattle; their machines for tedding hay, for stacking it with least possible risk, for cutting and steaming it; for ploughing up weeds, ploughing up moorlands, and even roads; for reaping by wholesale, and raking by wholesale; for tapping deep springs, and guttering the surface for the escape of top-water; there are their machines for paring and levelling lumpy lands; for cross-cutting furrows to make rough mossy land take seed better; their channels, sluices, and schemes for irrigation. And then, who shall tell all their implements for hay-binding, rope-twisting, furze-pounding for cattle; their novel churns, their ratteries, their new-fangled mole-traps, their poultry-feeders, and pheasant-feeders, by which those birds are enabled to help themselves from tin boxes supplied with grain for them, without feathered depredators being able to go shares with them. Truly Solomon might say that men now-a-days have sought out many inventions!

But who shall calculate all the thoughts and the labours of such men as Fitzherbert, Tusser, Gooch, Platt, Hartlib, Weston, Markham, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir John Norden, John Evelyn, Worlidge, Stillingfleet, Harte, Arthur Young, Maxwell, Lord Kaimes, Sir John Sinclair, etc. etc.? Who shall aggregate and estimate the numerous and valuable suggestions and articles of anonymous writers in the journals; and the personal labours and fostering influence of such men as the late Dukes of Buccleugh, and of Bedford, the Duke of Portland, Earl Spencer, the late Lord Somerville, Mr. Coke of Holkham, now the Earl of Leicester, and many other noblemen and gentlemen who have spent their lives in the unostentatious but most meritorious endeavour to perfect the agricultural science of England? With the exception of naturalists, there are no men whose pursuits seem to me to yield them so much real happiness as intelligent agriculturists whose hearts are in the business; and though there are men whose offices or professions place them more in the public eye, there are none who are more truly the benefactors of their country. Such were Lord Somerville and the Duke of Buccleugh, as described by Sir Walter Scott; and there is a passage in his memoir of the latter nobleman well worth the notice of those who propagate or believe in the nonsense of the economists on the non-influence of absenteeism. “In the year 1817, when the poor stood so much in need of employment, a friend asked the Duke why his Grace did not prepare to go to London in the spring? By way of answer, the Duke shewed him a list of day-labourers then employed in improvements on his different estates, the number of whom, exclusive of his regular establishments, amounted to nine hundred and forty-seven persons. If we allow to each labourer two persons, whose support depended on his wages, the Duke was in a manner foregoing, during this severe year, the privilege of his rank, in order to provide with more convenience for a little army of nearly three thousand persons, many of whom must otherwise have found it difficult to obtain subsistence. The result of such conduct is twice blessed; both in the means which it employs, and in the end which it attains in the general improvement of the country. This anecdote forms a good answer to those theorists who pretend that the residence of proprietors on their estates is a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of that district. Had the Duke been residing, and spending his revenue elsewhere, one half of these poor people would have wanted employment and food; and would probably have been little comforted by any metaphysical arguments upon population, which could have been presented to their investigation.”—Scott’s Prose Works, vol. 4.

Many such things may be daily heard of the present Duke of Portland, in the neighbourhood of Welbeck Abbey, in Nottinghamshire; which convince you that he is one of those men that contrive to pass through life without much noise, but reaping happiness and respect in abundance, and while gratifying the taste for rural occupation, conferring the most lasting benefits upon the country. I shall close this section of this chapter with the substance of one such act, related to me some years ago. In the manner of relation it may therefore differ somewhat from that in which originally told, but in fact I believe it to be perfectly correct. The Duke found that one of his tenants, a small farmer, was falling, year after year, into arrears of rent. The steward wished to know what should be done. The Duke rode to the farm; saw that it was rapidly deteriorating, and the man, who was really an experienced and industrious farmer, totally unable to manage it, from poverty. In fact, all that was on the farm was not enough to pay the arrears. “John,” said the Duke, as the farmer came to meet him as he rode up to the house, “I want to look over the farm a little.” As they went along,—“Really,” said he, “every thing is in very bad case. This won’t do. I see you are quite under it. All your stock and crops won’t pay the rent in arrear. I will tell you what I must do. I must take the farm into my own hands. You shall look after it for me, and I will pay you your wages.” Of course there was no saying nay,—the poor man bowed assent. Presently there came a reinforcement of stock, then loads of manure,—at the proper time, seed, and wood from the plantations for repairing gates and buildings. The Duke rode over frequently. The man exerted himself, and seemed really quite relieved from a load of care by the change. Things speedily assumed a new aspect. The crops and stock flourished; fences and outbuildings were put into good order. In two or three rent days, it was seen by the steward’s books that the farm was paying its way. The Duke on his next visit, said, “Well, John, I think the farm does very well now. We will change again. You shall be tenant again; and as you now have your head fairly above water, I hope you will be able to keep it there.” The Duke rode off at his usual rapid rate. The man stood in astonishment; but a happy fellow he was, when on applying to the steward he found that he was actually re-entered as tenant to the farm just as it stood in its restored condition;—I will venture to say, however, that the Duke himself was the happier man of the two.

CHAPTER VI.
PLANTING.

“Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye’re sleeping.”—Heart of Mid-Lothian.

What we have just said of the pleasures and benefit of scientific farming, may be said also of planting; it is but another interesting mode of employing time by landed proprietors, at once for recreation and the improvement of their estates. What, indeed, can be more delightful than planning future woods, where, perhaps, now sterile heather, or naked declivities present themselves; clothing, warming, diversifying in imagination your vicinity; then turning your visions into realities, and watching the growth of your forests? Since John Evelyn wrote his eloquent Sylva, and displayed the deplorable condition of our woodlands, and since Dr. Johnson penned his sarcastic Tour to the Hebrides, both England and Scotland have done much to repair the ravages made in the course of ages in our woods. A strong spirit on the subject has grown up in the minds of our landed gentry, and vast numbers of trees of all kinds suitable to our climate have been planted in different parts of the island. The Commissioners of Woods and Forests have made extensive plantations of oak in the New Forest, and other places. In the neighbourhood of all gentlemen’s houses we see evidences of liberal planting: and the rich effect of these young woods is well calculated to strengthen the love of planting. In this part of Surrey, wood, indeed, seems the great growth of the country. Look over the landscape from Richmond Hill, from Claremont, from St. George’s or St. Anne’s Hill, and it is one wide sea of wood. The same is the case in the bordering regions of Buckingham and Berk shires. Richmond Park, Hampton-Court Park, Bushy Park, Claremont and Esher Parks, Oatlands, Painshill, Windsor, Ockham, Bookham—the whole wide country is covered with parks, woods, and fields, the very hedge-rows of which are dense, continuous lines of trees. Look into the part of Kent approaching the metropolis from the heights of Norwood, and the prospect is the same. Many of the extensive commons hereabout, as Bookham and Streatham commons, are scattered with fine oaks, some of them very ancient, and diversified with thickets and green glades, and rather resemble old forests and parks, than commons as seen elsewhere. Then again, the sandy heaths of Surrey are covered in many places with miles of Scotch firs. There certainly is no want of wood in these parts. In the sandy wastes of Old Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, many thousand acres, principally of larch, have been planted on the estates of the Dukes of Portland and Newcastle, Lord Scarborough, Earl Manvers, Colonels Need, Wildman, and other proprietors. Even the cold hills of the Peak of Derbyshire have been planted in some parts extensively; and lands in those districts which were literally unproductive, are now a source of considerable income from the thinning of the woods. In Scotland the same change is very visible. All along the borders the good lands are beautifully cultivated, the bad extensively planted. From the dreary flats about Gretna Green to the borders of Northumberland and Berwickshire, this is the case. Passing into Scotland by the Cheviots, we saw extensive woods on the border lands of the Duke of Northumberland, Earl Tankerville, Mr. Collingwood, Mr. St. Paul, etc. The cold and wild tract between Kelso and Edinburgh presents cheering appearances of the extension of the planting spirit. In the counties of Argyle, Ross, and Inverness, which Monteith of Stirling, in his Forester’s Guide, particularly points out as wanting wood, we were struck with the great extent of planting already done. Every summer tourist up the Clyde sees how much the woods round Roseneath have sheltered and beautified it—and the woods around Inverary Castle are, to a great extent, very splendid—while all the way thence to Oban you pass through mountain glens and over moorlands enriched with woods. The Duke of Athol, about Athol and Dunkeld, has planted upwards of 15,000 acres. The Duke of Montrose has been a great planter. Sir Walter Scott was a diligent planter, as the young woods round Abbotsford testify; and there are no moments of his life in which we can imagine him happier than when mounted on his pony he progressed through his plantations at his leisure, with his pruning-knife in his hand. But what he did on his own estate is trivial to what he did by his writings. He may be said to have planted more trees by his pen than any man alive has with his spade. He himself tells us that the simple words put into the mouth of the Laird of Dumbiedikes, and placed as a motto at the head of this chapter, induced a certain Earl to plant a large tract of country.

In the neighbourhood of Dingwall, Beuley, Beaufort,—from Inverness to Culloden,—in short, in almost every part of the Highlands,—you find extensive young woods of larch and pine. Many of these, it must be confessed, have apparently been made with more regard to profit than beauty. In many of the sweet straths, and along the feet of the mountains, the long monotonous reaches of larch—an unbroken, unvaried succession of pointed pyramids—present but an indifferent contrast to the free slopes of beauty which the native growth of the birches exhibits; dotting glens and embosoming lochs with a fairyland loveliness. As they become large, and are thinned properly, or rather, where they are planted thinly, on the plan of the Duke of Athol, this defect may be remedied. Scotch firs, when large, assume a wild forest majesty; and larches in mountainous situations, of an ancient growth, have an Alpine sweep of boughs that is extremely picturesque and graceful; but young crowded firs of any kind are too formal for beauty.

Mr. Wordsworth, in his Guide to the Lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland, complains grievously of the injury done to the scenery there, by the injudicious planting of larch. “Larch and fir plantations have been spread, not merely with a view to profit, but in many instances for the sake of ornament. To those who plant for profit, and are thrusting every other tree out of the way, to make room for their favourite, the larch, I would utter first a regret, that they should have selected these lovely vales for their vegetable manufactory, when there is so much barren and irreclaimable land in the neighbouring moors, and in other parts of the island, which might have been had for this purpose at a far cheaper rate.—It must be acknowledged that the larch, till it has outgrown the size of a shrub, shews, when looked at singly, some elegance of form and appearance, especially in spring, decorated, as it then is, by the pink tassels of its blossoms; but, as a tree, it is less than any other pleasing. Its branches—for boughs it has none—have no variety in the youth of the tree, and little dignity even when it attains its full growth; leaves it cannot be said to have, consequently affords neither shade nor shelter. In spring, the larch becomes green long before the native trees, and its green is so peculiar and vivid, that, finding nothing to harmonize with it, wherever it comes forth a disagreeable speck is produced. In summer, when all other trees are in their pride, it is of a dingy, lifeless hue; in autumn, of a spiritless unvaried yellow; and in winter, it is still more lamentably distinguished from any other deciduous tree of the forest, for they seem only to sleep, but the larch seems absolutely dead. If an attempt be made to mingle thickets, or a certain proportion of other forest trees, with the larch, its horizontal branches intolerantly cut them down, as with a scythe, or force them to spindle up to keep pace with it. The terminating spike renders it impossible that the several trees, where planted in numbers, should ever blend together so as to form a mass, or masses of wood. Add thousands to tens of thousands, and the appearance is still the same—a collection of separate individual trees, obstinately presenting themselves as such; and which, from whatever point they are looked at, if but seen, may be counted upon the fingers. Sunshine, or shadow, has little power to adorn the surface of such a wood; and the trees not carrying up their heads, the wind raises amongst them no majestic undulations.”

There is much truth in these remarks, and they cannot be too much borne in mind by all planters where picturesque beauty is an object. On dreary moors, where the larch is planted merely for profit, and where the tout-ensemble cannot readily be attained, woods of it often present a great degree of pleasantness by contrast. They give you green glades and narrow footpaths, between heath and fern, their slender boughs hanging above you, especially in the freshness of their foliage, very agreeably. As a matter of profit, and for the value of its timber, few species of wood can compete with it. The following extract from the Transactions of the Highland Society, gives a very striking view of its importance. “Larch will supply ship-timber at a great height above the region of the oak; and while a seventy-four gun ship will require the oak timber of seventy-five acres, it will not require more than the timber of ten acres of larch; the trees, in both cases being sixty-eight years old. The larch, at Dunkeld, grows at the height of 1300 feet above the level of the sea; the spruce at 1200; the Scotch pine at 700; and deciduous trees at not higher than 500. The larch, in comparison with the Scotch pine, is found to produce three and three-quarter times more timber, and that timber of seven times more value. The larch also, being a deciduous tree, instead of injuring the pasture under it, improves it. The late Duke of Athol, John the Second, planted in the last year of his life, 6500 Scotch acres of mountain ground solely with the larch, which in the course of seventy-two years from the time of planting will be a forest of timber fit for the building of the largest class of ships in her majesty’s navy. It will have been thinned out to about 400 trees per acre. Each tree will contain at the least fifty cubic feet, or one load of timber, which, at the low price of one shilling the cubic foot, only one half of its present value, will give 1000l. per acre, or in all, a sum of 6,500,000l. sterling. Besides this there will have been a return of 7l. per acre from the thinnings, after deducting all expense of thinning, and the original outlay of planting. Further still, the land on which the larch is planted, is not worth above ninepence or one shilling per acre. After the thinnings of the last thirty years, the larch will make it worth at least ten shillings per acre by the improvement of the pasturage, on which cattle can be kept summer and winter.”

That is pretty well. This calculation is made upon land stated at 1s. per acre, planted with larch; but Monteith, an experienced timber planter and valuer, gives us for oak planted on land of 1l. per acre yearly rent, the following statement.

“If the proprietor, for instance, plants 100 acres of ground, the trees being placed four feet distant from each other, each acre will contain 3422 plants. If it be planted with hard woods, chiefly oaks, and a few firs to nurse them up, supposing it is a plantation purely for profit,

Hitherto the amount of gain is comparatively small, but this calculation continued according to the growth of the trees for ten years more, will leave the balance no less than 23,667l. And to the end of forty years from first planting, the round sum of 41,000l. “These calculations,” says Monteith, “may, to those who have paid no attention to the subject, excite wonder if not doubt, but in making them the author has been careful to lessen rather than exaggerate the profits: and if the plantation shall have been carried to the age of sixty or seventy years, and properly thinned, etc., the value will be double what it was at forty years.” Thus, if 100 acres in seventy years will yield 80,000l. planted with oak, 6000 acres will yield about 5,000,000l.; while 6000 acres of the larch plantations of Athol in the same period are calculated to yield about 6,000,000l. There is sufficient agreement to lead us to suppose the calculations probably accurate, and what a splendid inducement to judicious planting do these calculations present!

The following facts, given in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” (vol. i., art. Agriculture), are also particularly interesting to the planter. Mr. Pavier, in the fourth volume of the Bath Papers, computes the value of fifty acres of oak timber in 100 years to be 12,100l., which is nearly 2l. 10s. annually per acre; and if we consider that this is continually accumulating, without any of that expense or risk to which annual crops are subject, it is probable that timber-planting may be accounted one of the most profitable departments of husbandry. Evelyn calculates the profit of 1000 acres of oak land in 150 years at no less than 670,000l.

The following table shews the increase of trees from their first planting. It was taken from the Marquis of Lansdowne’s plantation, begun in the year 1765, and the calculation made in 1786. It is about six acres in extent, the soil partly a swampy meadow upon a gravelly bottom. The measures were taken at five feet above the surface of the ground; the small trees having been occasionally drawn for posts and rails, as well as rafters for cottages, and when peeled of the bark will stand well for seven years.

From this table it appears that the planting of timber trees, when the return can be waited for twenty years, will undoubtedly repay the original cost of planting as well as the interest of the money laid out, which is better worth the attention of the proprietor of land, as the ground on which they grow may be supposed good for cattle also.

In Argyleshire, there are probably 40,000 acres of natural coppice wood which are cut periodically; commonly every nineteen or twenty years, and are understood to return about 1l. an acre annually. Very extensive plantations have been formed by the Duke of Argyle, and other proprietors. About thirty years ago those of his Grace were reckoned to contain 2,000,000 trees, worth then 4s. each amounting to the enormous sum of 400,000l.

I knew a certain old military officer who during his early years was a captain in a militia regiment. His brother officers were a gay set of fellows, and were continually drawing on their private incomes, and often coming to him to borrow money; but he made it a rule never to spend more than his own pay, and as to money, he never had any to lend. He went down to his estate every spring and autumn, and planted as many acres of trees as his rental would allow him. His planting gave him a perpetual plea of poverty. At a certain age he retired on his half-pay. A large family was growing around him, but his woods were growing too. Many a time have I seen him, mounted on an old brood mare, with a sort of capacious game-bag across her loins, with his gun slung at his shoulder, his saws and pruning-knives strapped behind his saddle, going away into his woods: and keeping the calculations of Monteith, and of the larch plantations of Athol, in mind, I can now imagine the profound satisfaction which the old gentleman, through a long course of years, must have felt in the depths of his forest solitudes. He is still living, at an advanced age. His family is large, and has been expensive; but his woods were large too, and no doubt their thinnings have proved very grateful thinnings of his family charges.

CHAPTER VII.
GARDENS.

We must now wind up, in a few words, what we have to say of the country life of the gentry, and these words must be on their gardens. In these, as in all those other sources of enjoyment that surround them, perfection seems to be reached. They live in the midst of scenes which, while they appear nature itself, are the result of art consummated only by ages of labour, research, science, travel, and the most remarkable discoveries. Nothing can be more delicious than the rural paradises which now surround our country houses. Walks, waters, lawns of velvet softness, trees casting broad shadows, or whispering in the stirrings of the breeze; seclusion and yet airiness; flowers from all regions, besides all the luxuries which the kitchen-garden, the orchard, conservatories, hothouses, and sunny walls pour upon our tables, are so blended and diffused around our dwellings, that nothing on earth can be more delectable. It is impossible, without looking back through many ages of English life, to form any idea of the real advantages which we enjoy of this kind,—of the immense stride we have made from the bare and rigid life of our ancestors. How many of the fruits or flowers, or culinary vegetables, which we possess in such excellence and perfection, did this country originally produce? Few, indeed, of our indigenous flowers are retained in our gardens, few of our vegetables besides the cabbage and the carrot; and what were the ancient British fruits besides the crab and the bullace? But we have only to look back to the feudal times to see the wide difference between our gardens and those then existing; for all that could be enjoyed of a garden must be compressed within the narrow boundary of the castle moat. Every thing without was subject to continual ravage and destruction; and though orchards were planted without, and suffered to take their chance, the ladies’ little parterre occupied some sheltered nook of the court, or space between grim towers:

Now was there maide fast by the touris wall,
A garden faire, and in the corneris set
An herbere grew; with wandis long and small,
Railit about, and so with treeis set
Was all the place, and hawthorn hedges knet,
That lyfe was now, walkyng there for bye,
That myght within scarce any wight espye.

The Quair, by James I. of Scotland.

And the plot of culinary herbs occupied some sheltered spot within the moat; which when it is recollected how many other requisites of existence and defence were also compressed into the same space—soldiers, arms, and machines of war; sleeping and eating rooms; room for the stabling and fodder of horses, and often of cattle; space for daily exercise, martial or recreative; bowls, tilting or tennis,—when cooped up by their enemies, or made cautious by critical times, small indeed must have been the space or the leisure for gardens. Even in 1540, Leland in his Itinerary, tells us that our nobility still dwelt in castles, and there retained the usual defences of moats, and drawbridges. This was especially the case, the nearer they approached to the Scotch or Welsh borders; though in the vicinity of London villas and palaces had long sprung up. At Wressel Castle, near Howden, in Yorkshire, he says, “The gardens within the mote, and the orchardes without, were exceeding fair. And yn the orchardes were mounts, opere topiario, writhen about with degrees like the turnings in cokil shelles, to come to the top without payn.” The career, indeed, by which our gardens have reached their present condition, has been, as I have said, the career of many ages, revolutions, and stupendous events. It is not only curious, but most interesting to trace all those circumstances which have contributed to raise horticulture to its present eminence,—the great national events, the extension of discovery, of the arts, of general knowledge; the deep ponderings in cells and fields; the achievements of genius, of enterprise; the combinations of science, and the variations of taste which have brought it to what it is. The history of our gardening is, in fact, the history of Europe. The monks, whose religious character gave them an extraordinary security, as they were the first restorers of agriculture, so they were the first extenders and improvers of our gardens. Their long pilgrimages from one holy shrine to another, through France, Germany, and Italy, made them early acquainted with a variety of culinary and medicinal herbs, and with various fruits; and amongst the ruins of abbeys we still find a tribe of plants that they thus naturalized. The crusades gave the next extension to horticultural knowledge; the growing commerce and wealth of Europe fostered it still farther; and the successive magnificent discoveries of the Indies, America, the isles of the Pacific and Australia, with all their new and splendid and invaluable productions, raised the desire for such things to the highest pitch; and made our gardens and greenhouses affluent beyond all imagination. What hosts of new and curious plants do they still send us every season! From every corner of the earth are they daily reaching us: the average value of the plants in Loddige’s gardens is calculated at 200,000l. But what a blank would they now be but for the mighty spirit of commerce, the thirst of discovery, and of traversing distant regions, which animate such numbers of our countrymen, and send them out to extend our geography, geology, and natural history, or to prosecute astronomical and philosophical science under every portion of the heavens? And besides these causes, how much is yet to be accounted for by the tastes of peculiar ages—out of the peculiar studies of the times, and the singular genius of particular men thence arising. The influence of poets and imaginative writers upon the character of our gardens has been extreme. Whether an age were poetical or mathematical, made a mighty difference in the garden-style of the time. C. Matius, the favourite of Augustus Cæsar, introduced the fashion at Rome of clipping trees into shapes of animals and other grotesque forms; Pliny admired the invention, and celebrated it under the name of topiary-work; and so strongly did it take hold on the spirits of men, that it descended to all the nations of Europe, and was not exploded by us till the last century. Sir Henry Wotton, the tasteful and poetical courtier of Queen Elizabeth, and ambassador of James to Venice, with notions of the fitness of a garden far beyond his age, yet thought it “a graceful and natural conceit” in Michael Angelo to make a fountain-figure in the shape of “a sturdy washerwoman, washing and winding of linen clothes, in which act she wrings out the water which made the fountain.” And again Addison, followed by Pope and Walpole, overturned this ancient fondness for pleached walks, and tonsured trees, and quaint fountain-figures, whether of Neptunes, Niles, or washerwomen. Then the great change of the social system, from the feudal and military to civil and domestic, produced a correspondent change in the culture of gardens. While the country was rent to pieces by contentions for the crown, there could be little leisure or taste for gardens; but when men became peaceful, and collected their habitations into clusters, they naturally began to embellish both them and their environs.

From the reign of Edward III. to that of Henry VIII. we look over a large space, and find but slight improvement in horticulture, and scanty traces of its literature. A bushel of onions in Richard II.’s reign cost twelve shillings of our present money: Henry VII. records himself, in a MS. preserved in the Remembrance Office, that apples were in his day one and two shillings each, a red one fetching the highest price; and Henry VIII.’s queen, Catherine, when she wanted a salad, sent to Flanders for it. The very first book which was written on the culture of the soil in this country, appears to be Walter de Henly’s—“De Yconomia sive Housbandria,” Then came Nicholas Bollar’s books, “De Arborum Plantatione,” and “De Generatione Arborum et Modo Generandi et Plantandi,” and some other MS. writings. Richard II. rewarded botanical skill in the person of John Bray with a pension. Henry Calcoensis in the fifteenth century composed a Synopsis Herbaria, and translated Palladius de Re Rustica into Gaelic. In the sixteenth century William Horman, Vice-Provost of Eton, wrote Herbarum Synonyma and Indexes to Cato, Varro, Columella, and Palladius; and in the same century Wynkin de Worde printed “Mayster Groshede’s Boke of Husbandry,” which contained instructions for planting and grafting of trees and vines. Arnold’s Chronicle in 1521, had a chapter on the same subject, and how to raise a salad in an hour; and Pynson published the “Boke of Surveying and Improvements.” Then came Dr. Bulleyn, Dodoneus, Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, and Tusser; and that is the history of gardens and their literature till the time of Henry VIII.; but thence to the eighteenth century,—to the days of Bridgman and Kent, what multitudes of grand, quaint, and artificial gardens were spread over the country. Nonsuch, Theobalds, Greenwich, Hampton-Court, Hatfield, Moor-Park, Chatsworth, Beaconsfield, Cashiobury, Ham, and many another, stood in all that stately formality which Henry and Elizabeth admired, and in which our Surreys, Leicesters, Essexes; the splendid nobles of the Tudor dynasty, the gay ladies and gallants of Charles II.’s court, had walked and talked, fluttered in glittering processions, or flirted in green alleys and bowers of topiary-work; and amid figures, in lead or stone, fountains, cascades, copper trees dropping sudden showers on the astonished passers under, stately terraces with gilded balustrades, and curious quincunx, obelisks, and pyramids—fitting objects of the admiration of those who walked in high-heeled shoes, ruffs and fardingales, with fan in hand, or in trunk-hose and laced doublets.

“The palace of Nonsuch,” said Hentzner in 1598, “is encompassed with parks full of deer, delicious gardens, groves ornamented with trellis-work, cabinets of verdure (summer-houses, or seats cut in yew), and walls so embowered with trees, that it seems to be a place pitched upon by pleasure herself to dwell in along with health. In the pleasure and artificial gardens are many columns and pyramids of marble; two fountains that spout water, one round, the other like a pyramid, upon which are perched small birds that stream water out of their bills. In the grove of Diana is a very agreeable fountain, with Actæon turned into a stag, as he was sprinkled by the goddess and the nymphs, with inscriptions. Here is, besides, another pyramid of marble full of concealed pipes, which spurt upon all who come within their reach.” In the gardens of Lord Burleigh, at Theobalds, he tells us are nine knots, artificially and exquisitely made, one of which was set for the likeness of the king’s arms. One might walk two miles in the walks before he came to the end.

In Hampton-Court, was a fountain with syrens and other statues by Fanelli. At Kensington were bastions and counterscarps of clipped yew and variegated holly, being the objects of wonder and admiration under the name of the siege of Troy. At Chatsworth the temporary cascade, the water-god, the copper-tree, and the jets-d’eau, still remain in all their glory.

The hands of Bridgman, Kent and Brown, and the pens of Addison, Pope, and Walpole, have put all this ancient glory of Roman style to the flight; and driven us, perhaps, into danger of going too far after nature. The winding walks, the turfy lawns, the bowery shrubberies, the green slopes to the margin of waters, the retention of rocks and thickets where they naturally stood,—all this is very beautiful, and many a sweet elysian scene do they spread around our English houses. But in imitating nature we are apt to imitate her as she appears in her rudest places, and not as she would modify herself in the vicinity of human habitations. We are apt to make too little difference between the garden and the field; between the shrubbery and the wood. We are come to think that all which differs from wild nature is artificial, and therefore absurd. Something too much of this, I think, we are beginning to feel we have had amongst us. It has been the fashion to cry down all gardens as ugly and tasteless, which are not shaped by our modern notions. The formalities of the French and Dutch have been sufficiently condemned. For my part, I like even them in their place. One would no more think of laying out grounds now in this manner, than of wearing Elizabethan ruffs, or bag-wigs and basket-hilted swords; yet the old French and Dutch gardens, as the appendages of a quaint old house, are in my opinion, beautiful. They are like many other things—not so much beautiful in themselves, as beautiful by association—as memorials of certain characters and ages. A garden, after all, is an artificial thing; and though formed from the materials of nature, may be allowed to mould them into something very different from nature. There is a wild beauty of nature, and there is a beauty in nature linked to art: one looks for a very different kind of beauty in fields and mountains, to what one does in a garden. The one delights you by a certain rude freedom and untamed magnificence; the other, by smoothness and elegance—by velvet lawns, bowery arbours, winding paths, fair branching shrubs, fountains, and juxta-position of many rare flowers.

It appears to me that it is an inestimable advantage as it regards our gardens, that the former taste of the nation has differed so much from its present one. Without this, what a loss of variety we should have suffered! If the taste of the present generation had been that of all past ages, what could there have been in the gardens of our past kings, nobles, and historical characters to mark them as strongly and emphatically as they are now marked? They now, indeed, seem to belong to men and things gone by; and I would as soon almost see one of our venerable cathedrals rased with the ground, as one of those old gardens rooted up. There is something in them of a sombre and becoming melancholy. They are in keeping with the houses they surround, and the portraits in the galleries of those houses. When we wander through the pleached alleys, and by the time-stained fountains of these old gardens, perished years indeed seem to come back again to us. In the centre of some vast avenue of majestic elms or limes, sweeping their boughs to the ground, “the dial-stone aged and green” arrests our attention, and points not to the present hour, but to the past. Our historic memories are intimately connected with such places. Our Howards, Essexes, Surreys, and Wolseys, were the magnificent founders and creators of such places; and in such, Shakspeare and Spenser, Milton and Bacon, and Sidney mused. It is astonishing what numbers of our poets, philosophers, and literati, are connected with the history of our gardens by their writings, or love of them. Sir Henry Wotton, Parkinson, Ray, John Evelyn, Sir Walter Raleigh, Bacon, Addison, Pope, Sir William Temple, who not only wrote “the Garden of Epicurus,” but so delighted in gardening that he directed in his will that his heart should be buried beneath the sun-dial in his garden at Moor-Park in Surrey, where it accordingly was deposited in a silver box: Horace Walpole, Locke, Cowley, Shenstone, Charles Cotton, Waller, Bishop Fleetwood, Spence, the author of Polymetis, Gilpin of the Forest Scenery, Mason, Dr. Darwin, Cowper, and many others, have their fame linked to the history or the love of gardens.

There is something very interesting too, in the biography of our old patriarchs of English gardening. There is scarcely one of those large nurseries and gardens round London but is connected with them, as their founders, or improvers—as the Tradescants of Lambeth,—London and Wise of Brompton,—Philip Miller of Chelsea,—Gray of Fulham,—Furber of Kensington,—Lee of Hammersmith. It is cheering to observe how much our monarchs, from Henry VIII. to George III. were, with their principal nobility, almost to a man, whatever was their character in other respects, not even excepting the dissipated Charles II., munificent patrons of gardening, and founders of grand gardens. It is interesting to read of the giant labours, and now apparently curious locations of our early gardeners and herbalists. How Dr. Turner imbibed botanical knowledge from Lucas Ghinus at Bologna, and came and established a “garden of rare plants” at Kew; while Mrs. Gape had another at Westminster, which furnished the first specimens for Chelsea garden. How Ray, and Lobel, and Penny, roamed everywhere in search of new plants. How Didymus Mountain published his “Gardener’s Labyrinth:” how Sir Hugh Platt, of Lincoln’s-Inn, gentleman, wrote the Jewel House of Art and Nature, the Paradise of Kew, and the Garden of Eden, and had, moreover, a garden in St. Martin’s Lane. How the “Rei Rusticæ” of Conrad Heresbach, counsellor to the Duke of Cleve, was translated by Barnaby Googe, and reprinted by Gervase Markham, gentleman, of Gotham in Nottinghamshire. How old John Gerarde travelled, when young, up the Baltic, and had his “Physick Garden” in Holborn. How John Parkinson travelled forty years before he wrote his “Paradisus,” and was appointed by Charles I. for his Theatre of Plants, Botanicus Regius Primarius. How Gabriel Plattes, though styled by his cotemporaries, “an excellent genius,” and “of an adventurous caste of mind,” died miserably in the streets. How Walter Blythe of Oliver Cromwell’s army wrote the “Survey of Husbandry,” which Professor Martyn pronounces “an incomparable work.” How Samuel Hartlib, the son of a Polish merchant, the friend of Milton, of Archbishop Usher and Joseph Meade, wrote his “Legacy,” and assisted in establishing the embryo Royal Society; how John Tradescant was in Russia, and accompanied the fleet sent against the Algerines in 1620, and collected on that occasion plants in Barbary, and in the isles of the Mediterranean; and how his son John, afterwards made a voyage in pursuit of plants to Virginia, “and brought many new ones back with him.” How their Museum, established in South Lambeth, and called “Tradescant’s Ark,” was the constant resort of the great and learned; how it fell into the hands of Elias Ashmole, and became the Ashmolean Museum.

These, and such facts, shew us by what labours and steps our present garden-wealth has been raised; and diffuse an interest over a number of places familiar to us. Go, indeed, into what part of the island we will, we find some object of attraction and curiosity in the gardens attached to our old houses. As the coach passes the residence of Colonel Howard, at Leven’s Bridge in Westmoreland, it stops, the passengers get out, and mount upon its top, and there behold a fine old Elizabethan house, standing in the midst of a garden of that age, with all its topiary-work, its fountains, statues, and lawns. At Stonyhurst in Lancashire, now a Jesuit’s College, I was delighted to find a beautiful old garden of this description, which I have elsewhere described; and at Margam Abbey in South Wales, I found a fine assemblage of orange trees, the very trees which Sir Henry Wotton sent from Italy as a present to James I. These trees had been thrown ashore here by the wreck of the vessel, and the owner of the place, by the king’s permission, built a splendid orangery to receive them, which stood in the centre of a garden surrounded on three sides by woody hills; and in which fuchsias, at least ten feet high, with stems thick as a man’s arm, were growing in the open air, and tulip-trees large as the forest trees around. But what gave a still greater charm to this garden was, that the ruins of a fine old abbey stood here and there on its lawn; arches, overgrown with bushes, and the graceful pillars of a noble chapter-house, around whose feet lay stones of ancient tombs and curious sculpture. These are the things which give so delicious a variety to our English gardens: and when we bear in mind that many of those artifices and figures which we have been accustomed to treat with contempt as Dutch, are in reality Roman; that such things once stood in the magnificent gardens of Lucullus and Sallust; that the Romans gathered them again from the Eastern nations; that they are not only classical, but that, like many of the rites of our church and religious festivals, they are the reliques of the most ancient times, I think we shall be inclined to regard them with a greater degree of interest—not as objects to imitate or to place in any competition with our own more natural style, but as things which are of the most remote antiquity, and give a curious diversity to our country abodes. For my part, when I see even a fantastic peacock spreading its tail in yew in some old cottage or farm-house garden I think of Pliny and his admiration of such topiary-work, and would not have it cut down for the world. Even those summer-houses built in trees, such as that built by the King of Belgium, in Winter-Down wood, near Claremont; a sketch of which is presented in the title-page—were Roman fancies; were formed, Pliny tells us, amid the branches of any monarch trees that grew within their grounds, and that even Caligula had one in a plane-tree, near his villa at Velitræ, which he called his Nest.

Here then to all the sweet nests of English gardens, new or old, we bid adieu, with blessings on their pleasantness.

CHAPTER VIII.
COUNTRY EXCITEMENTS.

Before closing this department of my work, I must just glance at a few occurrences which serve to give an occasional variety to rural life, and may be classed under the head of Country Excitements. These are races, race-balls, county-balls, concerts, musical festivals, elections, assizes, and confirmations. It will not be requisite to do more than merely mention the greater part of these, for, to describe at length the race-ball and county-balls, the winter concerts of the county town and the musical festivals, would require a separate volume, and they indeed, after all, belong more to the town than to the country. Having, therefore, simply pointed them out as sources of occasional variety to wealthy families during their stay in the country, I shall confine myself in these concluding remarks, to those few particulars which belong more entirely to my subject. Balls and musical exhibitions are sufficiently alike everywhere, to need no distinct details here. It is enough that they serve to break the rural torpor of those who regard existence as only genuine during the London season. The application of the profits both of these balls, and of the musical festivals that have of late years been held in different places, to the support of infirmaries, and to other public objects of benevolence, deserves the highest commendation. Thus dismissing these amusements, neither I nor my readers, I am sure, would wish to have the uproar and exasperation of the county election introduced into this peaceful volume; enough that when it does come to the country Hall, it comes, often as a hurricane, and frequently shakes it to the foundation, leaving in its track debts and mortgages, shyness between neighbours, and rancour amongst old friends.

It would not be giving a faithful view of country life, however, were we to keep out of sight all agitating causes, and all existing drawbacks to the felicity for which such ample materials exist in it. Surveying those splendid materials, as displayed in the preceding chapters,—those abundant means and opportunities, which the wealthy possess for enjoying their lives in the country;—it would be giving a most one-sided view of the rural life of the rich, if we left it to be inferred that “the trail of the serpent” was not to be perceived at times on the fair lawns, and up the marble steps of rural palaces; that the great “Bubbly-Jock,” (Turkey-Cock) which Scott contended that every man found in his path did not shew himself there. The Serpent and the Bubbly-Jock which disturb and poison the rural life of the educated classes in England, are the very same which dash with bitter all English society in the same classes. They are the pride of life, and the pride of the eye. They are that continual struggle for precedence, and those jealousies which are generated by a false social system. Every man lives now-a-day for public observation. He builds his house, and organizes his establishment, so as to strike public opinion as much as possible. Every man is at strife with his neighbour in the matter of worldly greatness. The consequence is, that a false standard of estimation, both of men and things, is established—shew is substituted for real happiness; and no man is valued for his moral or intellectual qualities, so much as for the grandeur of his house, the style of his equipage, the richness of his dinner service, and the heavy extravagance of his dinners. The result of this is, that most are living to the full extent of their means, many beyond it, and few are finding, in the whole round of their life, that alone, which better and higher natures seek—the interchange of heart and mind, which yields present delight, creates permanent attachments, and fills the memory with enduring satisfaction.

This, it must be confessed, is a wretched state of things; but it is one which every person conversant with society knows to exist, and which intelligent foreigners witness with unfeigned surprise. The worst of it is that this unnatural system of life becomes the most sensibly felt in the country. In large towns every man finds a sufficient circle after his own taste: there the petty influences of locality are broken up by the multitude of objects, and the ample choice in association. But in small towns, and country neighbourhoods, where wealthy or educated families are thinly scattered, nothing can be more lamentable, and, were it not lamentable, nothing could be more ludicrous, than the state of rivalry, heart-burning, jealousy, personal mortification, or personal pride, from mere accidents of condition or favour. The titled have a fixed rank, and are comparatively at their ease, but in the great mass of those who have wealth, more or less, without title, what a mighty and eating sore is the struggle for distinction. In the little town, or thinly-scattered neighbourhood, every one is measuring out his imaginary dignity to see if it does not exceed, at least by some inches, that of one or other of his neighbours. The lower you descend in the scale, the more exacting becomes the spirit of exclusiveness. The professions look down upon the trades; the trades on one another. Everywhere the same uneasy spirit shews itself. Nothing can be more ludicrous, or amusing to the philosophic spectator, than to observe how leadership is assumed in every country neighbourhood by certain wealthy families; how carefully that leadership is avoided and opposed by other families. How the majority of families aspire to move in one or the other circle; what wretched and anomalous animals those feel themselves that are not recognised by either. How the man who drives his close carriage looks down upon him who only drives his barouche or phaeton; how both contemn the poor occupier of a gig. I have heard of a gentleman of large fortune who, for some years after his residence in a particular neighbourhood, did not set up his close carriage, but afterwards feeling it more agreeable to do so, was astonished to find himself called upon by a host of carriage-keeping people, who did not seem previously aware of his existence; and rightly deeming the calls to be made upon his carriage, rather than himself, sent round his empty carriage to deliver cards in return. It was a biting satire on a melancholy condition of society, the full force of which can only be perceived by such as have heard the continual exultations of those who have dined with such a great person on such a day, and the equally eager complaints of others, of the pride and exclusiveness they meet with; who have listened to the long catalogue of slights, dead cuts, and offences, and witnessed the perpetual heart-burnings incident to such a state of things. These are the follies that press the charm of existence out of the hearts of thousands, and make the country often a purgatory where it might be a paradise.

There is another cause which diminishes in a great degree the enjoyment that might be found in the country, and that is, the almost total cessation of walking amongst the wealthy. Since the universal use of carriages, for anything I can see, thousands of people might just as well be born without legs at all. It would be easy to move them from the bed to the carriage,—thence to the dinner-table, and again to bed. In the country, and especially in the country not far from towns, how rarely do you see the rich except in their luxurious carriages! How rarely do you meet them walking, or even on horseback, as you used to do! Sir Roger de Coverley rode on horseback to the assizes in his day—were he living now, he would roll there in his carriage—lest some one should imagine that he had mortgaged his estate, and laid down his carriage in retrenchment. During the twelve months that I have resided in this neighbourhood—a neighbourhood studded all over with wealthy houses, nothing has surprised me, and the friends who have visited me here, so much as the great rarity of seeing any of the wealthy classes on their legs. With the exception of the Queen and her attendant ladies, who during the then Princess’s abode at Claremont, might be every day met in the winter, walking in frost and snow, and facing the sharpest winds of the sharpest weather, I scarcely remember to have met half-a-dozen of the wealthy classes on foot a mile from their residences. And yet what splendid, airy heaths, what delicious woods, what nooks of bowery foliage, what views into far landscapes, are there all around! It is true, as some of them have observed, that they walk in their own grounds; but what grounds, however beautiful, can compensate for the fresh feeling of the heath and the down; for the dim solemnity of the wild wood; for open, breezy hills, the winding lane, the sight of rustic cottages by the forest side, the tinkle of the herd or the sheep-bell, and all the wild sounds and aspects of earth and heaven, to be met with only in the free regions of nature? They who neglect to walk, or confine their strolls merely to the lawn and the shrubbery, lose nine-tenths of the enjoyment of the country. Those young men, whom it is a pleasure to see with their knapsacks on their backs ranging over moor and mountain, by lake or ocean, in Scotland or Wales, taste more of the life of life in a few summer months than many dwellers in the country ever dream of through their whole existence. I speak advisedly, for I traverse the country in all directions, let me be where I will; and if any ladies think themselves too delicate for walking, I can point them out delicate ladies too that have made excursions on foot through mountain regions of five hundred miles at a time, and recur to those seasons as amongst the most delightful of their lives.

But my desire that all should make their country life as happy as it is capable of being made—which must be by living more to nature and less to fashion—by using both their physical and moral energies; by respecting themselves, and leaving the respect of others to follow as the natural result of a true and pure tone of spirit—is detaining me too long. I must hasten on; and amongst the most prominent of the country excitements, give a passing word to racing. If any one wishes to know how far the turf influences the course of country life, he has only to read the following passage from Nimrod. “Deservedly high as Newmarket stands in the history of the British turf, it is but as a speck on the ocean when compared with the sum total of our provincial meetings, of which there are about one hundred and twenty in England, Scotland, and Wales—several of them twice in the year. Epsom, Ascot, York, Doncaster, and Goodwood, stand first in respect of the value of the prizes, the rank of the company, and the interest attached to them in the sporting world; although several other cities and towns have lately exhibited very tempting bills of fare to owners of good race-horses. In point of antiquity we believe the Roodee of Chester claims pre-eminence of all country race-meetings;—and certainly it has long been in high repute. Falling early in the racing year—always the first Monday in May—it is most numerously attended by the families of the extensive and very aristocratic neighbourhood in which it is placed; and always continues five days.”—The Turf, p. 246.

Every one who has seen the crowds of wealthy people who flock to a celebrated race-meeting, and throng the stand and the carriage stations, with brilliant dresses and gay equipages, may imagine, then, how much excitement is spread through that class of society during their stay in the country; by one hundred and twenty race-meetings in one quarter or other of the island; especially as the greater part of these occur during the months that they are absent from town. So having read the passage quoted from Nimrod, he has only to turn to the volume itself—a volume written with great ability; and, making allowance for the author’s sporting predilections, in an excellent spirit, and he will thus find that course described as such a horrible resort of blacklegs and desperadoes, of traitorous jockeys and poisoning trainers, as makes one at once recoil from the recital, and wonder that our young nobles and gentlemen should commit themselves and their fortunes to such hands; or that the fair and the refined should consent to gaze on such a scene of infamy. Hear Nimrod’s own words—“How many fine domains have been shared amongst these hosts of rapacious sharks, during the last two hundred years! and unless the system be altered—how many more are doomed to fall into the same gulf! For, we lament to say, the evil has increased; all heretofore, indeed, has been ‘tarts and cheesecakes’ to the villanous proceedings of the last twenty years on the English turf.” Let us move on to less repulsive scenes.

Amongst these may be reckoned the periodical arrivals of the bishops and the judges. The arrival of the bishop to perform the ceremony of confirmation, is but a triennial occurrence, but it is one of the most imposing of the rites of the church. The flocking of the clergy and their families to town; the processions of country children on foot, and led by the parish clerk or schoolmaster, or in carts and other rustic vehicles; the gathering of the children of the rich towards the church in their white dresses, and in gay carriages; the assembling of all classes in the common temple of their religion; the solemnity of the address and the imposition of hands by the prelate; the stately music of the organ, and the silent looking on of the congregated people—all combine to produce a very striking spectacle—a spectacle which to those who believe in its essentiality and efficacy, has something in it touching and beautiful.

But perhaps the parade of the assize time, is the most picturesque of this class of occurrences. There is more of the old English ceremony, custom, and costume about it. The judges who go through the land as the representatives of majesty, certainly go through it en prince. Nothing can be more unlike than their progress to, and their state in, the courts in town, and the same things in their provincial tour of justice. In town you may see the Lord Chief Justice mount his horse at his own door, and ride quietly away towards Westminster Hall. You may see Lord Abinger in the Court of Exchequer, sitting very much at his ease in his black gown and wig of modest dimensions, dispatching business in a work-a-day manner; but in the country you find these very men arrayed in their scarlet and ermine, seated in much greater state, and dispensing justice in a much fuller court than, except on extraordinary occasions, attends them in town.

The high-sheriff of every county, selected from its best families, in preparation for the arrival of the county judge, has put his equipage and train in order. His carriage, his horses, his harness, all have undergone a rigid examination, and are all put into the highest condition that paint, gilding, varnish, lining, and plate, can bestow; or if he be a young man of some spirit and ambition, he has purchased a new carriage for the occasion. His tenants and household servants, to the number of forty or fifty, have been put into a new livery in the cut of the old yeomen, and generally of some bright or peculiar colour, green, blue, white, or delicate drab, as indeed the livery of the gentlemen may be. Mounted on their horses, and with their javelins or halberds, and preceded by two trumpeters, who, old Aubrey can tell you, are a very ancient essential on such occasions, they escort the sheriff on his way to meet the judges. The sheriff who has thus showily appointed what are provincially termed his javelin-men, has not in the meantime neglected himself. He has put on at least a court dress, and in cases where he has happened to be a man of taste, and a man of figure to boot, he has put on a rich suit of the fashion of Sir Charles Grandison, or of some one of his ancestors, as he stands in full-length portraiture in his family gallery. He issues from his hall, arrayed perhaps in a rich mulberry coloured coat with huge embroidered cuffs and button-holes, huge gold buttons, and lining of primrose serge; a splendid waistcoat of gold brocaded satin, with ample pockets and flaps reaching half-way to his knees; satin breeches, and silk stockings with immense clocks; large gold buckles at his knees and upon his shoes. Add to this his sword, his cocked hat, and his cravat and ruffles of fine point lace, and you have the high-sheriff in all his glory, just as we saw him in one of our county assize courts not many years ago, sitting on the right hand of the judge; and it must be confessed in admirable keeping with his old-world robes of scarlet and ermine. Well, he enters the county town with his troop of javelin-men, his trumpeters blowing stoutly before him. He takes up his lodgings there, and on the morning of the judge’s approach, he marches out in the same style, followed by a long train of the gentlemen and tradesmen of the place, who are anxious to testify their respect to the ancient forms of justice, and the representative of the monarch. He advances some mile or two on the way by which the judge is to arrive. There the procession halts, generally in a position which commands a view of the road by which the judge is expected. Anon, there is a stir, a looking out amongst them, your eye follows theirs, and you see a carriage, dusty and travel-soiled, come driving rapidly on. It is that of the judge. As they drive up, the javelin-men and gentlemen uncover; the sheriff descends from his carriage; his gowned and bewigged lordship descends from his; the sheriff makes his bow and his compliments; the judge enters the carriage of the sheriff with him, his own carriage falls into the rear, and the procession now moves on towards the town, with bannered trumpets blowing, and amid a continually increasing crowd of spectators. There is something very quaint and old English in the whole affair; and as I have seen the sheriff and his train thus, waiting the approach of the judge on some rising ground in the public road, the scene has brought back to my imagination a feeling of the past times—simpler in heart than the present, but more formal in manner, and perhaps fonder of solemn parade. But the bells are ringing merrily to welcome the learned judge, and thousands are thronging to see the sight of the sheriff and his men, and to catch a glimpse of the judge’s wig as the coach passes, and many of them to wonder how the sheriff can seem so much at his ease with such an awful man: while within the strong walls of the prison, the sounds of bells and the trampling feet of the crowds without, are causing stout hearts and miserable hearts to tremble and feel chill.

Well, the procession and the throng “go sounding through the town,” and the court being opened in due form, they arrive at the judge’s lodgings, whence, after a suitable time allowed for the judge’s refreshment, they proceed to church. Whatever may be the effect of this custom of the judge’s going to church before proceeding to discharge his awful duties of deciding upon the destinies of his fellow men, it is a beautiful one, and bespeaks in those who instituted it, a just sense of the value of human life, and of the true source whence all right judgment must proceed. It was well, and more than well, that the judge should be sent to hear from the Christian minister, that the temper in which a judge should sit to decide the fate of his fellow mortals, should be that of the Christian—the divine union of justice and mercy. It was well that he should be reminded that every act of his judgment in the court about to open, must one day be rejudged, in a court and before a judge, from which there can be no appeal.

As they move on towards the great mother-church, thousands on thousands throng to gaze. Every window presents its quota of protruded heads; every flight of steps before the doors of houses, and every other elevated spot, is occupied. Boys are hanging by lamp-posts, and on iron palisades, like bats. The procession used to be much enlivened by the presence of the mayor and corporation in their robes, and with the mace borne before them; but the New Corporation Act has led to a woful stripping of this pageant. The sheriff selects the clergyman to preach on the occasion, who is generally some young friend or relative whom he wishes to bring into notice. This ceremony being over, the judge returns to the court; the grand jury, selected from the gentlemen of the county, present their bills, and the trials proceed. In the sheriff’s gallery may be seen some of his friends, perhaps the ladies of his family and other acquaintances, with others, all introduced by ticket; on the bench by the judge, may often be seen seated with the sheriff, some great man or lady of the neighbourhood, especially if some trial in which one of their own body, some disputed will which involves a large property, or similar cause of interest, draws them from their homes, and fills the court to suffocation. While the court continues, day by day you see the train of javelin-men come marching on foot with the state carriage of the sheriff, to conduct him from his lodgings to those of the judge, and back again at the close of the court in the evening, till the trials are ended; and judge, sheriff, gay carriage, with its splendid hammer-cloth, jolly coachman, and slim footmen, in their cocked hats and flaxen wigs, javelin-men, and crowd, all meet and vanish away, and the excitement of the assize is over for another half-year.

Such are the principal country excitements; and to these may be added those of another class, which have sprung up of late years, and have done much good—the floral and horticultural shews. These have been warmly patronized by the aristocracy; and it forms a striking feature in modern country life, to see carriages and pedestrians hastening, on certain days to certain places, where different flowers and fruits, in their respective seasons, are displayed with great taste, and with brilliant effect. The place of meeting is sometimes at a country inn, where, on the bowling-green, tents are pitched, in which the flowers or fruits are exhibited, and the whole scene is extremely gay. Such a one I saw at Kingston Hill, near Richmond Park—a Dahlia shew: on the end of the house an invitation to all England being gorgeously emblazoned in dahlia-flowers, surmounted by the crown royal, and the good English initials Q. V.; looking as though the worthy horticulturists meant to set the rational example of using the English language to the English people.

PART II.
LIFE OF THE AGRICULTURAL POPULATION.

CHAPTER I.
THE ENGLISH FARMER.

There are few things which give one such a feeling of the prosperity of the country, as seeing the country people pour into a large town on market-day. There they come, streaming along all the roads that lead to it from the wide country round. The footpaths are filled with a hardy and homely succession of pedestrians, men and women, with their baskets on their arms, containing their butter, eggs, apples, mushrooms, walnuts, nuts, elderberries, blackberries, bundles of herbs, young pigeons, fowls, or whatever happens to be in season. There are boys and girls too, similarly loaded, and also with baskets of birds’ nests in spring, cages of young birds, and old birds, baskets of tame rabbits, and bunches of cowslips, primroses, and all kinds of flowers and country productions imaginable. The carriage-road is equally alive, with people riding and driving along; farmers and country gentlemen, country clergymen, parish overseers, and various other personages, drawn to the market-town by some real or imagined business, are rattling forward on horseback, or in carriages of various kinds, gigs, and spring-carts, and carts without springs. There are carriers’ wagons, and covered carts without end, many of them shewing from their open fronts, whole troops of women snugly seated; while their dogs chained beneath, go struggling and barking along, pushing their heads forward in their collars every minute as if they would hang themselves. This is in the morning; and in the afternoon you see them pouring out again, and directing their course to many a far-off hamlet and old-fashioned abode. But there is a wide difference between coming in and going out. The wagons and carts go heavily and soberly, for they are laden with good solid commodities, groceries and draperies, mops, brushes, hardware and crockery, newspapers for the politicians, and sundry parcels of teas, sugars, and soaps, and such et ceteras, for the village shops; but the farmers go riding and driving out three times as fast as they came in, for they are primed with good dinners and strong beer. They have chaffered, and smoked, and talked with the great grazier and the great corn-factor, and their horses are full of corn too, and away they go, in fours and fives, filling the whole width of the road, and raising a dust, if there be the least dust to be raised, or making the mud fly in all directions; away they go, talking all together, while their horses are trotting at such a pace as one would think would shake the very teeth out of their heads. The sober foot-people who are trudging homeward more soberly than they came, say, as they fly past, “One wouldn’t think times very bad neither.” And the carriers hold their horses’ heads as they rush past, and smiling significantly, say, just as they are gone past,—“Well done my lads! that’s it; go it my lads, go it! Yo riden, though your horses go a-foot!”

There is no class of men, if times are but tolerably good, that enjoy themselves so highly as farmers. They are little kings. Their concerns are not huddled into a corner, as those of the town tradesman are. In town, many a man who turns thousands of pounds per week, is hemmed in close by buildings, and cuts no figure at all. A narrow shop, a contracted warehouse, without an inch of room besides to turn him, on any hand; without a yard, a stable, or outhouse of any description; perhaps hoisted aloft, up three or four pair of dirty stairs, is all the room that the wealthy tradesman often can bless himself with; and there, day after day, month after month, year after year, he is to be found, like a bat in a hole of a wall, or a toad in the heart of a stone, or of an oak tree. Spring, and summer, and autumn, go round; sunshine and flowers spread over the world; the sweetest breezes blow, the sweetest waters murmur along the vales, but they are all lost upon him; he is the doleful prisoner of Mammon, and so he lives and dies. The farmer would not take the wealth of the world on such terms. His concerns, however small, spread themselves out in a pleasant amplitude both to his eye and heart. His house stands in its own stately solitude; his offices and outhouses stand round extensively, without any stubborn and limiting contraction; his acres stretch over hill and dale; there his flocks and herds are feeding; there his labourers are toiling,—he is king and sole commander there. He lives amongst the purest air and the most delicious quiet. Often when I see those healthy, hardy, full-grown sons of the soil going out of town, I envy them the freshness and the repose of the spots to which they are going. Ample old-fashioned kitchens, with their chimney-corners of the true, projecting, beamed and seated construction, still remaining; blazing fires in winter, shining on suspended hams and flitches, guns supported on hooks above, dogs basking on the hearth below; cool, shady parlours in summer, with open windows, and odours from garden and shrubbery blowing in; gardens wet with purest dews, and humming at noon-tide with bees; and green fields and verdurous trees, or deep woodlands lying all round, where a hundred rejoicing voices of birds or other creatures are heard, and winds blow to and fro, full of health and life-enjoyment. How enviable do such places seem to the fretted spirits of towns, who are compelled not only to bear their burthen of cares, but to enter daily into the public strife against selfish evil and ever-spreading corruption. When one calls to mind the simple abundance of farm-houses, their rich cream and milk, and unadulterated butter, and bread grown upon their own lands, sweet as that which Christ broke, and blessed as he gave to his disciples; their fruits ripe and fresh plucked from the sunny wall, or the garden bed, or the pleasant old orchard; when one casts one’s eyes upon, or calls to one’s memory the aspect of these houses, many of them so antiquely picturesque, or so bright-looking and comfortable, in deep retired valleys, by beautiful streams, or amongst fragrant woodlands, one cannot help saying with King James of Scotland, when he met Johnny Armstrong:—

What want these knaves that a king should have?

But they are not outward and surrounding advantages merely, which give zest to the life of the farmer. He is more proud of it, and more attached to it, than any other class of men, be they whom they may, are of theirs. The whole heart, soul, and being of the farmer are in his profession. The members of other professions and trades, however full they may be of their concerns, have their mouths tied up by the etiquette of society. A man is not allowed to talk of his trade concerns except at the risk of being laughed at, and being set down as an egotistic ignoramus. But who shall laugh at or scout the farmer for talking of his concerns? Of nothing else does he, in nine cases out of ten, think, talk, or care. And though he may be called a bore by all other classes, what concerns it him? for other classes are just as great bores to him, and he seeks not their company. The farmers are a large class, and they associate and converse principally with each other. “Their talk is of bullocks,” it is true, but to them it is the most interesting talk of all. What is so delightful to them as to meet at each other’s houses, and with bright glasses of nectarous ale, or more potent spirit sparkling before them, and pipe in mouth, to talk of markets, rents, tithes, new improvements, and the promise of crops? To walk over their lands of a Sunday afternoon together, and pronounce on the condition of growing corn, turnips, and grass; on this drainage, or that neighbour’s odd management; on the appearance of sheep, cattle, and horses. And this is to be excused, and in a great degree to be admired. For those are no artificial objects on which they expend their lives and souls; they are the delightful things of nature on which they operate; and nature operates with them in all their labours, and sweetens them to their spirits. This is the grand secret of their everlasting attachment to, and enjoyment of agricultural life. They work with nature, and only modulate and benefit by her functions, as she takes up, quickens, and completes the work of their hands. There is a living principle in all their labours, which distinguishes them from most other trades. The earth gives its strength to the seed they throw into it—to the cattle that walk upon it. The winds blow, the waters run for them; the very frosts and snows of winter give salutary checks to the rankness of vegetation, and lighten the soil, and destroy what is noxious for them; and every principle of animal and vegetable existence and organization co-operates to support and enrich them. There is a charm in this which must last while the spirit of man feels the stirrings of the spirit and power of God around him. It may be said that rude farmers do not reason on these things in this manner. No, in many, too many, instances I grant it; but they feel. There is scarcely any bosom so cloddish but feels more or less of this, and by no other cause can an explanation be given of the enthusiasm of farmers for their profession. It is not because they can sooner enrich themselves by it—that they are more independent in it—that they have greater social advantages in it. In all these particulars the balance is in favour of the active and enterprising tradesman; but it is this charm which has infused its sweetness into the bosoms of all rural people in all ages of the world. From the days of the patriarchs to the present, what expressions of delight the greatest minds have uttered on behalf of such a life. Think of Homer, Theocritus, Virgil, and Horace; of Cicero, whom I have elsewhere quoted; and of the many great men of this country, some of whom too I have noticed, who have devoted themselves with such eagerness to it.

That farmers are as intelligent as a parallel grade of society in large towns I do not mean to assert; that they are as truly aware of, and as united to defend, their real interests I will assert as little. Their solitary and isolated mode of existence weighs against them in these points; but that they have generally a sounder morality than a similar class of townsmen is indisputable. They have a simplicity of mind as well as manners that is more than an equivalent for the polish and conventional customs of society, and with this a cordiality that is very delightful, and very rarely now to be found—the good, homely heartiness of Old English days.

They, indeed, so vividly enjoy the common blessings of life, from their vigorous health, and unvitiated appetites, as well as from the cravings of their inner being, finding their food in the daily communion with nature, instead of that book-knowledge which is so extensively diffused through all classes of the city, and which, too commonly, while it quickens the intellect, and widens the sphere of observation, I am sorry to say, deadens the human sympathies and distorts the heart—that they make so much of their kindness appear in heaping upon you bodily comforts and refreshments as is often truly ludicrous. They would have you eat and drink for ever. One meal succeeds to another with a profusion and an importunity of hospitality that are overwhelming. They eat their bread with a sweetness and a capacity, generated by their active and laborious habits, that we, who lead more sedentary lives, and with minds and energies dissipated by a hundred objects unknown to them, have no idea of. People of all other classes place a great portion of their happiness in giving and eating great feasts; but a farmer seems to think all the good things of life are involved in feasting, and would feast you not once a year, but every day, and all day long, if he could.

Let us just glance at the routine of one day of good fellowship, such as is seen in farm-houses where there is plenty, and yet no great pretence to gentility. We have seen many such scenes.

The farmer invites his friends to dine with him. He will have a party. Suppose it at some period of the year when he is least busy; for his engagements depending on the progress of the seasons, and his whole wealth being at the mercy of the elements, he cannot postpone his duties, but must take them as they fall out. Suppose it then just before the commencement of hay-harvest, for then he has a short pause, between the putting in of his last crop of potatoes or corn, shutting up his fields, and clearing his green-corn lands, and that moment when the first scythe enters his hay-fields, when a course of arduous and anxious labours begins, that will not cease till all his crops are safely housed,—hay, corn, beans, pease, and potatoes. Suppose at this pause in the growing time of summer, or after harvest, or amid the festive days of Christmas, he feels himself comparatively at leisure, in good spirits, and disposed to enjoy himself. He and his wife arrange their plans. Invitations are sent. On market-day he lays in all necessaries,—tea, coffee, prime cuts of beef and other meat; wine and spirits; sugar and spices. At home there is busy preparation. His garden is cleaned up; an operation of rare occurrence with a busy farmer, who thinks so much of his fields that he thinks but little of his garden. His stables and his rick-yard are put in order. The very manes and tails of his horses are trimmed, for all will have to pass under the critical notice of his friends, and he feels his professional character at stake. In the house there is equal activity. There is a world of cleaning and setting in order. Floors are scoured. The best carpets are put down. This room is found to want fresh staining; painting wants doing here and there, both within and without. Trees also want nailing and trimming on the walls; and it is probable there may want some spout repairing, or tiles renewing, that have often been talked of, but never could have time found for their doing. The house and all about it look fifty per cent. the better. The neatly cleaned walks and closely mown grass-plots; the brightly cleaned windows, and the scarlet curtains, and the purely white blinds seen within, give an air of completeness that is very satisfactory.

And then within begin the mighty preparations for the feast. Geese, turkeys, ducks and fowls are killed and pulled, and part are cooked, and part are made ready for cooking. If the farmer shoots, and it be the season, there are hares and rabbits, pheasants and partridges, brought to the larder; if he do not, he makes friends with the keeper, who occasionally takes a social pipe and glass with him; or he makes a direct request to his landlord for this indulgence. Hams are boiled, pies are made, puddings of the richest composition are put together. If it be Christmas, loud is the chopping of meat for minced-pies, busy the mixing of spices; and the washing and picking of currants and raisins; and pork-pies and sausages of most savoury and approved manipulation are raised into material existence. If the sucking-pig escapes whipping—and we hope no honest farmer is now cruel enough for this operation—creams and syllabubs do not; they are whipped, not to death, but into life. There are blanc-mange and jellies, crystalline and fragrant; clouted creams, and cream of strawberries, raspberries, and I know not what melting and delicious things. And O! such cheesecakes, and such patties, and such little cakes of various names and natures, for tea, and entremets, and dessert. I see the oven-door open and shut, as the iron tray of nicely laden patty-pans goes into the oven, or comes out with a rich perfection, and with odours most delicious, most mouth-melting, most inexpressible! The good and skilful dame, and the no less skilful and comely daughters, if she have them, and they are grown up to years of discretion in these delicate and culinary arts—what is not their depth of occupation! What glowing looks are theirs; what speculations; what contrivances and anticipations! I would fain take an easy chair in some cool corner of this milk-and-honey-flowing kitchen, and watch all their sweet employment, and hear all their sweet words in a grateful silence. But they are far from the end of their labours. Nuts, walnuts, apples and pears, and other fruit, according as the season may be, are produced from their stores, or from the sunny walls and trees, wiped from every trace of mould or dust from the store-room, and placed in their proper receivers of glass, or china, or possibly of plate. Wine and spirit decanters are to be washed and carefully dried, and to be charged with their bright contents. The discovery of the richest cheese in the whole cheese-room is to be made by tasting; butter is to be moulded in small cakes, and imprinted with patterns of the deepest and most elegant figure, and a thousand other things made, or done, of which the tasting were to be desired rather than the catalogue to be particularized, for, wonderful and manifold are all thy works, O thou accomplished spouse of a wealthy farmer!

What dainties has that greater oven received into its more capacious cavern. Bread of the most exquisite fineness; and pies of varied character—fruit, pork, beef-steak, and giblet—if in Devon or Cornwall, sweet giblet, a pie that all England besides knows not of,—figgy-bread, and saffron-cake of transcendant brilliance and taste.

And then comes the great day! The guests are invited to dinner; but they have been enjoined to come early, and they come early with a vengeance. They will not come as the guests of night-loving citizens and aristocrats come, at from six to nine in the evening;—no, at ten and eleven in the morning you shall see their faces, that never yet were ashamed of day-light, and that tell of fresh air and early hours. Then come rattling in sundry vehicles with their cargoes of men and women; lively salutations are exchanged; the horses are led away to the stables, and the guests into the house to doff great coats and cloaks, hats and bonnets, and sit down to luncheon. And there it is ready set out. “They’ll want something after their drive,” says the host. “To be sure,” says the hostess; and there is plenty in truth. A boiled ham, a neat’s tongue; a piece of cold beef; fowls and beef-steak-pie; tarts, and bread, cheese and butter; coffee for the ladies, and fine old ale for the gentlemen.

“Now do help yourselves,” exclaims the host from one end of the table, “I am sure you must be very hungry after such a ride.” “I am sure you must indeed,” echoes the hostess from the other, while a dozen voices cry all at once, “O, really I don’t think I can touch a bit. We got breakfast the moment before we set off;” and all the time deep are the incisions made into the various viands: and plentifully heaped are plates; and bright liquor is poured into glasses, and a great deal of talk of this and that, and inquiries after this and that person go on; a hearty luncheon is made, and the gentlemen are ready to set out and look about them. They are warned by the hostess to remember that dinner will be on table at one o’clock—“exactly at one!” and assuming hats and sticks, away they go.

While they perambulate the farm, and pass learned judgments on land, cattle, and crops; and make besides excursions into neighbouring lands, to some particular experiment in management, or extraordinary production of combined art and nature, our hostess shews her female friends her dairy, her cheese-room, her poultry-yard, and discussions as scientific are going on, on the best modes of fattening calves, rearing turkey broods, and on all the most approved manipulations of cheese and butter. The quantities produced from a certain number of cows are compared, and many wonders expressed that lands of apparent equality of richness should some yield little butter and much cheese, and others little cheese and much butter; facts well known to all such ladies, but not easy of explanation by heads that pretend to see further into the heart of a difficulty than they do. A walk is probably proposed and undertaken through the garden and orchard, and flowers and fruits are descanted on; and all this time in the house roasting, and boiling, and baking, are going on gloriously. Savoury steams are rolling about under the ceilings; busy damsels with faces rosier than ever, are running to and fro on the floors; stable-boys are turned into knife-cleaners, and plough-lads into peelers of potatoes and watchers of boiling pots, and turnspits.

The hour arrives; and a sound of loud voices somewhere at hand announces that our agricultural friends are returned punctually to their time, with many a joke on their fears of the ladies’ tongues. Not that they seemed to want any dinner—no, they made such a luncheon; but they had such a natural fear of being scolded. Well, here they all are;—and here are the ladies all in full dress. Hands that have been handling prime stock, or rooting in the earth, or thrust into hay-ricks and corn-heaps, are washed, and down they sit to such a dinner as might satisfy a crew of shipwrecked men. There are seldom any of your “wishy-washy soups,” except it be very cold weather, and seldom more than two courses; but then they are courses! All of the meat kind seems set on the table at once. Off go the covers, and what a perplexing but unconsumable variety! Such pieces of roast beef, veal, and lamb; such hams, and turkeys, and geese; such game, and pies of pigeons or other things equally good, with vegetables of all kinds in season—peas, potatoes, cauliflowers, kidney-beans, lettuces, and whatever the season can produce. The most potent of ale and porter, the most crystalline and cool water, are freely supplied, and wine for those that will. When these things have had ample respect paid to them, they vanish, and the table is covered with plum-puddings and fruit tarts, cheesecakes, syllabubs, and all the nicknackery of whipped creams and jellies that female invention can produce. And then, a dessert of equal profusion. Why should we tantalize ourselves with the vision of all those nuts, walnuts, almonds, raisins, fruits, and confections? Enough that they are there; that the wine circulates—foreign and English—port and sherry—gooseberry and damson—malt and birch—elderflower and cowslip,—and loud is the clamour of voices male and female. If there be not quite so much refinement of tone and manner, quite so much fastidiousness of phrase and action, as in some other places, there is at least more hearty laughter, more natural jocularity, and many a

Random shot of country wit,

as Burns calls it. A vast of talk there is of all the country round; every strange circumstance; every incident and change of condition, and new alliance amongst their mutual friends and acquaintances, pass under review. The ladies withdraw; and the gentlemen draw together; spirits take place of wine, and pipes are lighted. We know what subjects will interest them—farming improvements and politics—and so it goes till tea-time.

When summoned to tea, there are additional faces. The pastor and his wife, perhaps a son and daughter, or daughters, are there; and there is the clerk too,—the very model of respect and reverence towards his clerical superior. Whatever that learned authority asserts, this zealous and “dearly-beloved Moses” testifies. He calls attention to what the vicar says; he repeats with great satisfaction his sayings. There too, is the surgeon, and often the veterinary surgeon, especially as he also is often a farmer, and in intercourse with all the farmers far and near. This may seem an odd jumble of ranks, but it is no more odd than true. Who that has seen anything of rural life has not seen odder medleys? Besides, money in all grades of society can do miracles. There are clergymen in many parishes, who maintain their own ideas of dignity, and seldom move out of the circle of squires and dames; but there are others, and in perfectly rural districts there are abundance of others, that know how to mix more freely with the yeomanry of their flocks, and lose nothing neither. If they respect themselves, they insure the respect, and what is better, the attachment of their hearers.

But the vicar’s presence on such a day is felt. There is a more palpable approximation towards silence;—a drawing tighter of the reins of conversational freedom. The great talkers of after-dinner are now become great listeners, and often on such occasions I have seen a scene worthy of the sound sense of English yeomen; for the pastor addresses his observations and inquiries now to this individual, and now to that; and now converses in a tone of pleasant humour with the ladies; so that you may often hear as sober discussions on the passing topics of the day, and on the prospects of the country, and especially of that part of it to which they belong, delivered in a homely manner perhaps, but with a discrimination and practical knowledge that are very gratifying. And on the part of the females you shall see so many symptoms of good-heartedness and real matronly mind as make you feel that sense, soul, and true sympathies, are of no particular grade, or particular style of life.

But there must be a dance for the young, and there are cards for the more sedate; and then again, to a supper as profuse, with its hot game, and fowls, and fresh pastry, as if it had been the sole meal cooked in the house that day. The pastor and his company depart; the wine and spirits circulate; all begin to talk of parting, and are loth to part, till it grows late; and they have some of them six or seven miles to go, perhaps, on a pitch-dark night, through by-ways, and with roads not to be boasted of. All at once, however, up rise the men to go, for their wives, who asked and looked with imploring eyes in vain, now shew themselves cloaked and bonneted, and the carriages are heard with grinding wheels at the door. There is a boisterous shaking of hands, a score of invitations to come and do likewise, given to their entertainers, and they mount and away! When you see the blackness of the night, and consider that they have not eschewed good liquor, and perceive at what a rate they drive away, you expect nothing less than to hear the next day, that they have dashed their vehicles to atoms against some post, or precipitated themselves into some quarry; but all is right. They best know their own capabilities, and are at home, safe and sound.

Such is a specimen of the festivities of what may be called the middle and substantial class of farmers; and the same thing holds, in degree, to the very lowest grade of them. The smallest farmer will bring you out the very best he has; he will spare nothing, on a holiday occasion; and his wife will present you with her simple slice of cake, and a glass of currant or cowslip wine, with an empressement, and a welcome that you feel to the heart is real, and a bestowal of a real pleasure to the offerer.

CHAPTER II.
THE ENGLISH FARMER, AS OPERATED UPON BY MODERN CAUSES AND THEORIES.

Cobbett complains that the farmer has been spoiled by the growth of luxurious habits and effeminacy in the nation. That the simple old furniture is cast out of their houses; that carpets are laid on their floors; that there are sofas and pianos to be found where there used to be wooden benches and the spinning-wheel; that the daughters are sent to boarding-school, instead of to market; and the sons, instead of growing up sturdy husbandmen, like their fathers, are made clerks, shopkeepers, or some such “skimmy-dish things.”

It is true enough that the general style of living and furnishing has progressed amongst the farmers as amongst all other classes of the community. And perhaps there has been too much of this. But it should be recollected that Cobbett was opposed to popular education altogether. He would have the rural population physically well off, but it should be physically only. He would have them feed and work and sleep like their sturdy horses or oxen: but is such a state desirable? Is it not far more noble, far more truly human, to have all classes partaking, as far as their circumstances will allow them, of the pleasures of mind? I would have real knowledge go hand in hand with real religious principle and moral feeling, and where they go, a certain and inseparable degree of refinement of manner and embellishment of abode will go with them. Would I have the follies and affectations of the modern boarding-school go into the farm-house? By no means. It is by the circulation of healthful knowledge that all this is to be rooted out, and the race of finical and half-genteel, and wholly ridiculous boarding-school misses to be changed into usefully taught and really valuable and amiable women. We should avoid one extreme as the other.

It should be recollected, too, that amongst farmers are to be found men of all ranks and grades. Farming has been, and is, a fashionable pursuit. We have ducal farmers, and from them all degrees downwards. Gentlemen’s stewards, educated men, are farmers; and many farmers are persons whose capital employed in their extensive concerns would purchase the estates of nobles. All these, of course, live and partake of the habits, general character, and refinements of the classes to which they, by their wealth, really belong: and amongst the medium class of farmers we find as little aspiring of gentility, as amongst the same grade of tradesmen. Nay, go into the really rural and retired parts of the country, and they are simple and rustic enough. Let those who doubt it go into the dales of Yorkshire; into the Peak, and retirements of Derbyshire; into the vales of Nottinghamshire, and midland counties; let them traverse Buckinghamshire and Shropshire; let them go into the wild valleys of Cornwall; ay, into the genuine country of almost any part of England, and they will find stone floors and naked tables, and pewter plates, and straw beds, and homely living enough in all conscience. They may see oxen ploughing in the fields with simple, heavy, wooden yokes, such as were used five hundred years ago; and horses harnessed with collars of straw, and an old rope or two, not altogether worth half-a-crown, doing the tillage of large farms. They may eat a turnip-pie in one place, and oatmeal cake, or an oatmeal pudding in another, and bless their stars if they see a bit of butcher’s meat once a week. Yes, there are primitive living and primitive habits left over vast districts of England yet, which, we trust, under a better view of things, will receive no change, except such as springs from the gradual and sound growth of true knowledge.

But they bring up their sons to be clerks and such “skimmy-dish things” in towns. Ay, there is the rub; and this we owe to the rage for large rentals inspired by the war prices; by false notions of improvement generated during the heyday of farming prosperity; by gentlemen making stewards of lawyers, who have no real knowledge of farming interests, and can, therefore, have no sympathies with the small farmer, or patience with him in the day of his difficulty, and whose only object is to get the greatest rent at the easiest rate. But above all, this we owe to the detestable doctrine of political economy, by which a dozen of moderate farms are swallowed up in one overgrown one,—a desert, from which both small farmers and labourers were compelled to depart, to make way for machinery, and Irish labourers at fourpence a day. Where were the farmers to put their sons when they were brought up? The small farms, the natural resource for divided capitals and commencements in agricultural life, were, in a great measure, annihilated; and a most useful race of men as far as possible rooted out. Thank God! this abomination and worse than Egyptian plague, is now seen through, and what is better, is felt. We shall yet have farms from fifty to a hundred acres, where men of small capital may try their fortunes, and have a chance of mounting up, instead of being thrust down into the hopeless condition of serfs. We may have humble homesteads, where a father and his sons may work together; where labour may await their days, and an independent fireside their hours of rest. Where a lowly, but a happy people may congregate at Christmas and other festivals, and the old games of blindman’s-buff, turn-trencher, and forfeits, may long be pursued in the evening firelight of rustic rooms.

The farmer has had his ups and downs. During the war he was too prosperous; since then he has been at times ground to the dust by low prices and high rents. Heaven send him a better day! We would see him as he is, in a healthy state of the country,—a rural king, sowing his corn and reaping his harvest with a glad heart, and amid the rejoicings of a numerous peasantry.

Of the great advance in the science of farming; of the various improved modes of management, and ingenious machines invented for facilitating the farmer’s labours, I have [spoken] under the head of the country gentleman’s pursuits and recreations. One or two other observations on the farmer and his life, may as well be given here.

One of the greatest drawbacks to the pleasantness of their abodes, is to be found in their miry roads and yards, and the stagnant pools and drainages that, in the greater number of instances, stand somewhere about them. One would think that the latter nuisances were intended by them to neutralize the effects of so much good fresh air as they have; to act as a check, lest they should, surrounded as they are, by every conducive to health and longevity, really live too long. There is scarcely a farm-house but has one of those drain pools, into which all the liquid refuse of their yards runs, and into which dead dogs and cats find their way as a matter of course. In summer, these places are green over, and often stand thick with the bubbles of a pestiferous fermentation; to all which they appear totally insensible, and must be really so, or they would contrive to locate them at a greater distance, or have them carried in a water-cart, and dispersed over their grass lands, where they would be of infinite service.

It is in winter that they are beset by miry roads; and have often yards so deep in dirt, that you cannot reach them on foot without getting over the shoes. They and their men stalk to and fro through a six-inch depth of mire as if they trod on a Turkey carpet; but I have often amused myself with imagining what would be the consternation of a cockney, or indeed of any townsman only accustomed to clean roads and good pavements, to find himself set down in the middle of one of those lanes that lead up to farm-houses, or away into their fields, or even in one of their fold-yards. But to find himself in one of these, as I have done many a time on a dark night, and with a necessity of proceeding,—oh patience! patience! then it is really felt to be a virtue. To slip, and plunge, and flounder on in such a darksome, deep-rutted, slipping and stick-fast road—sometimes the puddle soaking into your shoes, and sometimes sent by the pressure of your tread as from a squirt into your face:—“hic labor, hoc opus est.”

A few hours’ work now and then with an iron scraper in the yard, and a spade to let off the water in the lanes into the ditches, and the nuisance were prevented. One would have thought that the universal excellence of all the highways now would have made them sensible of the luxury of a good, dry footing; but they seem really quite unaware of it, except you point it out, and then they will tell you in good humour that they have road-menders at work regularly twice a-year—dry weather and frost!

I must here, too, say a word on the subject of small farms. Political economists, carrying out their theories of the power of capital, and the division of employments, have written many very plausible things in recommendation of large farms. They tell you that the men of capital, who alone can hold large farms, can alone afford to avail themselves of the aid of machinery for accelerating their operations; of expensive manures, such as bones, the ashes of bog-earth, such as are burnt in Berks and Wiltshire; and of new and improved breeds of sheep and cattle; all of which require long purses, that can pay, and wait for distant returns. These are all excellent reasons for having such men and such farms in the country, by which the march and spirit of improvement may be kept up, and from which, as from reservoirs, may, in due course, overflow the advantages they introduce to their less wealthy neighbours at a cheaper rate; but they are no arguments at all against the retention of less farms. It is, in fact, a well-known circumstance, that the speculative and amateur farmers generally farm at a greater expense than their neighbours, an expense, in most cases, never fully made up by the returns, and often really ruinous. That enlightened, systematic views, the division of employments, and a judicious outlay of capital, not always in every man’s power, enable large farmers to sell at a lower rate than smaller and poorer farmers, is to a certain degree true, but by no means to the extent supposed. No farm which exceeds the ready and daily survey of the cultivator will be found to produce these advantages. Beyond that extent, there must be overlookers employed, and these must be maintained at a great, and probably greater cost than a small farmer lives at on his rented farm; nor can such a system be expected to carry the intentions of the principal into effect with a success like that of his personal surveillance. The small farmer has motives to exertion which do not exist in a troop of hired labourers. Slave labour is notoriously inferior to the labour of freemen, because the freeman has internal motives that the slave never can have; and in the same manner a small farmer who labours on his own rented farm has motives to exertion that the common labourer, who labours for a daily sum, cannot have. If the small farmer employ any of these, he employs them under the influence of his own eye and example, and thereby communicates a stimulus that is absent on a larger scale of cultivation. The small farmer lives economically; frequently, there is no question, more economically, and yet better than the labourer, because he has all his faculties and energies at work to improve his farm and better his condition; circumstances that do not operate on the labourer, who receives just a bare sufficiency in his wage, and sees no possibility, and therefore entertains no hope, of accumulation. The small farmer works hard himself; his children, if he have them, assist him, and his wife too, who also is a manager and a worker. He looks round him, for his eyes are sharpened by his interests, and observes the plans, and measures, and improvements of his wealthier neighbour, adopts what he can of them, and often makes cheap and ingenious substitutes for others. Even if it were a fact, that the large farmer could drive the small farmer out of the country, it would be a circumstance most deeply to be deplored. It would extinguish a class of men of hardy, homely, and independent habits—a serious loss to the nation. It would break those steps out of the ladder of human aspiration, and the improvement of condition, that would have a most fatal influence on all society. An impassable gulf would be placed between the aristocracy of capital and the freedom of labour; which would produce, as its natural results, insolence, effeminacy, and corruption of manners, on the one side, and perpetual poverty, hopeless poverty, abjectness of spirit, or sullen and dangerous discontent, on the other. Even if, as Miss Martineau, in her interesting stories, has asserted, it were true that the labourer would be better clothed and fed than the small farmer, would the mere comfort of food and clothes make up, to men living in a free and Christian country, and within the daily reach of its influences, for the destruction of that ascending path which hope alone can travel? There would soon, on such a system, either in agriculture or manufactures, be but two classes in the country,—the great capitalist and the slave. The great capitalist would stand, like Aaron armed with his serpent rod, to eat up all the lesser serpents that attempted to lift their heads above that level which he had condemned them to. The mass would be doomed to a perpetual despair of even advancing one step out of the thraldom of labour and command, and their spirits would die within them, or live only to snatch and destroy what they could not legitimately reach.

But such, happily, is not the case. Circumstances place a limit to such things. The small farmer can and does exist, and has existed, and in many cases, flourished too, in the face of all changes, and surrounded by large farms cultivated with all the skill of modern art, and all the power of capital. I have seen and known such, and happier and more comfortable people do not exist. I do not mean by a small farm, what Miss Martineau has called such,—some dozen acres—mere cottage allotments—but farms of from fifty to a hundred acres. There must be full employment for a pair of horses, or there is created by their keep an undue charge for labour, which is a serious preventive of success. But where there is that full employment, a small farmer may live and prosper. The political economist generally reasons in straight lines. He will not turn aside to calculate the force of incidental circumstances; and yet, these incidental circumstances frequently alter a question entirely. For instance, a small farm may lie near a large town, and thereby furnish the tenant with a very lucrative trade in milk; and such incidental circumstances, owing to a location favourable for market, and other causes, frequently exist. Small farmers often pay attention to sources of profit, nearly, if not altogether, overlooked by larger ones. Who does not know what sums are made by cottagers and small occupiers, of the produce of their gardens and orchards, by carefully looking after it, and some one of the family bringing it to market, and standing with it themselves; while the great farmer seldom looks very narrowly to the growth or preservation of either, and therefore incurs both badness of crop and waste; and if he sends it to market, he sends it to the huckster at a wholesale price, to save the annoyance of standing with it. Small concerns, having small establishments, and no dignity to support, nor other cares to divert the attention, find in these resources alone frequently an income itself nearly equal to their expenditure.

To determine questions of this kind there requires a close examination into all their bearings, and into the habits and feelings of those concerned. The truth of the matter, as regards the most profitable size of farms, and their general benefit to the public, seems to be, that there should be some of various sizes, that various degrees of capital and capacity of management may be accommodated; that there may be a chance for those beginning who have little to begin with, and a chance of the active and enterprising rising, as activity and enterprise should. This seems the only system by which the healthful temperament of a community can be kept up; and that just equilibrium of interests, and that ascending scale of advantages maintained, by which not merely the wealth, but the real happiness of a state is promoted.

CHAPTER III.
FARM-SERVANTS.

The clown, the child of nature, without guile,
Blessed with an infant’s ignorance of all
But his own simple pleasures; now and then
A wrestling match, a foot-race, or a fair.—Cowper.

We have in a preceding chapter, taken a view of the English farmer. We have seen him at market—in his fields, and in his house receiving his friends to a holiday feast. If we were to go to the farm-house on any other day, and at any season of the year, and survey the farmer and his men in their daily and ordinary course of life, we should always see something to interest us; and we should have to contemplate a mode of existence forming a strong contrast to that of townsmen; and, notwithstanding the innovation which the progress of modern habits has made on life in the country, still presenting a picture of simplicity, homeliness, and quiet, which no other life retains. Thousands, indeed, looking into a farm-house, surveying its furniture, the apparatus and supply of its table, the manners and the language of its inhabitants, would wonder where, after all, was the vast change said to have taken place in the habits of the agricultural population. O! rude and antiquated enough in all conscience, are hundreds of our farm-houses and their inmates, in many an obscure district of merry England yet. The spots are not difficult to be found even now, where the old oak table, with legs as thick and black as those of an elephant, is spread in the homely house-place, for the farmer and his family—wife, children, servants, male and female; and is heaped with the rude plenty of beans and bacon, beef and cabbage, fried potatoes and bacon, huge puddings with “dip” as it is called, that is, sauce of flour, butter, and water boiled, sharpened with vinegar or verjuice, and sweetened with brown sugar or more economical molasses—“dip,” so called, no doubt, because all formerly dipped their morsel into it; a table where bread and cheese, and beer, and good milk porridge and oatmeal porridge, or stirabout, still resist the introduction of tea and coffee and such trash, as the stout old husbandman terms it. Let no one say that modern language and modern habits have driven away the ancient rusticity, while such dialogues between the farmer and guest as the following may be heard—and such may yet be heard in the Peak of Derbyshire, where this really passed.

Farmer at table to his guest.—Ite, mon, ite!

Guest.—Au have iten, mon. Au’ve iten till Au’m weelly brussen.

Farmer.—Then ite, and brust thee out mon: au wooden we hadden to brussen thee wee.[2]

[2] This is the present genuine dialect of the Peak, and is nearly as pure Saxon. It is curious to see in the southern agricultural counties, how the old Saxon terms are worn out by a greater intercourse with London and townspeople, although the people themselves have a most Saxon look, with their fair complexions and light brown hair; while, as you proceed northward, the Saxon becomes more and more prevalent in the country dialects. In the midland counties bracken is the common term for fern—in the south not a peasant ever heard it. The dialects of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Staffordshire, are so similar to that of the Sassenach of Scotland, the Lowland Scots, that the language of Burns was nearly as familiar to me when I first read his poems, as that of my village neighbours; and the Scotch read that clever romance of low life, “Bilberry Thurland,” with a great relish, the dialogues of which are genuine Nottinghamshire, because they said, it was such good Scotch. I have noticed that the plays of the boys in Derbyshire and in the Scotch Lowlands have similar names, differing from the English names in general; as the English game of bandy, in Derbyshire is shinny, in Scotland shinty.

It is no rare sight to see the farmer himself, with his clouted shoon and his fustian coat, ribbed blue or black worsted stockings, and breeches of corduroy; to see him arousing his household, at five o’clock of a morning, and his wife hurrying the servant-wenches, as they call them, from their beds, crying,—“Up, up, boulder-heads!” that is pebble-heads, or heavy-heads, and asking them if they mean to lie till the sun burns their eyes out; having them up to light fires, sweep the hearth, and get to milking, cheese-making, churning, and what not; while he gets his men and boys to their duties,—in winter, to fodder the horses and cows, and prepare for ploughing, or carting out manure; to supply the “young beast,”—young cattle, in the straw-yard with food; to chop turnips, carrots, mangel-würzel, cut hay, boil potatoes for feeding pigs or bullocks; thrash, winnow, or sack corn. In summer, to be off to the harvest-field. The wife is ready to take a turn at the churn, or to turn up her gown-sleeves to the shoulders, and kneeling down on a straw cushion, to press the sweet curd to the bottom of the cheese-pan. To boil the whey for making whey butter, to press the curd into the cheese-vats; place the new cheese in the press; to salt and turn, and look after those cheeses which are in the different stages of the progress from perfect newness and white softness, to their investment with the unctuous coating of a goodly age. He is ready to go with the men into the farm; she is ready to see that the calves are properly fed, and to bargain with the butcher for the fat ones; to feed her geese, turkeys, guinea-fowls, and barn-door fowls; to see after the collection of eggs; how the milk is going on in the dairy, the cream churning, and moulding of butter for sale. In some counties, especially in the west of England, numerous are those homely and most useful dames that you see mounted on their horses with nothing but a flat pad, or a stuffed sack under them, jogging to market to dispose of the products of their dairy and poultry yard, as fresh, hale, and independent, as their grandmothers were. As to the farmer himself, he can hold the plough as his father did before him. He hates your newfangled notions; he despises your fine-fingered chaps, that are brought up at boarding-schools till they are fit for nothing but to ride on smart whisk-tailed nags to market, and carry a bit of a sample-bag in their pockets; and had rather, ten times, be off to the hunt or the race-course than to market at all; or to be running after a dog and gun, breaking down fences and trampling over turnip and potato crops, when they ought to be watching that other idlers did not commit such depredations. He sits with his men, and works with his men; and, while he does as much as the best of them—follows the plough, the harrow, or the drill, empties the manure-cart on his fallows, loads the hay or the corn-wagon,—he many a time says to himself that the “master’s eye does still more than his hand.” The celebrated Mr. Robinson of Cambridge, who was fond of farming, gives in a letter to a friend, a most striking view of the perpetual recurrence of the little occupations which present themselves to the practical farmer, and however apparently trivial, are really important, and full of pleasure to those whose hearts are in such pursuit.—“Rose at three o’clock; crawled into the library, and met one who said,—‘work while ye have the light; the night cometh, when no man can work: my father worketh hitherto, and I work.’ Rang the great bell, and roused the girls to milking, went up to the farm, roused the horsekeeper, fed the horses while he was getting up; called the boy to suckle the calves and clean out the cow-house; lighted the pipe, walked round the garden to see what was wanted there; went up to the paddock to see if the weaning calves were well; went down to the ferry to see if the boy had scooped and cleaned the boat; returned to the farm, examined the shoulders, heels, traces, chaff and corn of eight horses going to plough, mended the acre-staff, cut some thongs, whip-corded the plough-boys’ whips, pumped the troughs full, saw the hogs fed, examined the swill-tubs, and then the cellar; ordered a quarter of malt, for the hogs want grains, and the men want beer; filled the pipe again, returned to the river, and bought a lighter of turf for dairy fires, and another of sedge for ovens; hunted out the wheelbarrows, and set them a trundling; returned to the farm, called the men to breakfast, and cut the boys’ bread and cheese, and saw the wooden bottles filled; sent one plough to the three roods, another to the three half-acres, and so on; shut the gates, and the clock struck five; breakfasted; set two men to ditch the five roods, two men to chop sods, and spread about the land, two more to throw up manure in the yard, and three men and six women to weed wheat; set on the carpenter to repair cow-cribs, and set them up till winter; the wheeler, to mend the old carts, cart-ladders, rakes, etc., preparatory to hay-time and harvest; walked to the six-acres, found hogs in the grass, went back and set a man to hedge and thorn; sold the butcher a fat calf and the suckler a lean one.—The clock strikes nine; walked into the barley-field; barleys fine—picked off a few tiles and stones, and cut a few thistles; the peas fine but foul; the charlock must be topped; the tares doubtful, the fly seems to have taken them; prayed for rain, but could not see a cloud; came round to the wheat-field, wheats rather thin, but the finest colour in the world; sent four women on to the shortest wheats; ordered one man to weed along the ridge of the long wheats, and two women to keep rank and file with him in the furrows; thistles many, blue-bottles no end; traversed all the wheat-field, came to the fallow-field; the ditchers have run crooked, set them straight; the flag sods cut too much, the rush sods too little, strength wasted, shew the men how to three-corner them; laid out more work for the ditchers, went to the ploughs, set the foot a little higher, cut a wedge, set the coulter deeper, must go and get a new mould-board against to-morrow; went to the other plough, gathered up some wood and tied over the traces, mended a horse-tree, tied a thong to the plough-hammer, went to see which lands wanted ploughing first, sat down under a bush, wondered how any man could be so silly as to call me reverend; read two verses in the Bible of the loving-kindness of the Lord in the midst of his temple, hummed a tune of thankfulness, rose up, whistled, the dogs wagged their tails, and away we went, dined, drunk some milk and fell asleep, woke by the carpenter for some slats which the sawyers must cut, etc. etc.”

So spends many a farmer of the old stamp his day, and at night he takes his seat on the settle, under the old wide chimney—his wife has her little work-table set near—the “wenches” darning their stockings, or making up a cap for Sunday, and the men sitting on the other side of the hearth, with their shoes off. He now enjoys of all things, to talk over his labours and plans with the men,—they canvass the best method of doing this and that—lay out the course of to-morrow—what land is to be broke up, or laid down; where barley, wheat, oats, etc. shall be sown, or if they be growing, when they shall be cut. In harvest-time, lambing-time, in potato setting and gathering time, in fact, almost all summer long, there is no sitting on the hearth—it is out of bed with the sun, and after the long hard day—supper, and to bed again. It is only in winter that there is any sitting by the fire, which is seldom diversified further than by the coming in of a neighbouring farmer, or the reading of the weekly news.

Such is the rustic, plodding life of many a farmer in England, and there is no part of the population for which so little has been done, and of which so little is thought, as of their farm-servants. Scarcely any of these got any education before the establishment of Sunday schools—how few of them do yet, compared with the working population of towns? The girls help their mothers—the labourers’ wives—in their cottages, as soon almost as they can waddle about. They are scarcely more than infants themselves, when they are set to take care of other infants. The little creatures go lugging about great fat babies that really seem as heavy as themselves. You may see them on the commons, or little open green spots in the lanes near their homes, congregating together, two or three juvenile nurses, with their charges, carrying them along, or letting them roll on the sward, while they try to catch a few minutes of play with one another, or with that tribe of bairns at their heels—too old to need nursing, and too young to begin nursing others. As they get bigger they are found useful in the house—they mop and brush, and feed the pig, and run to the town for things; and as soon as they get to ten or twelve, out they go to nurse at the farm-houses; a little older, they “go to service;” there they soon aspire to be dairymaids, or housemaids, if their ambition does not prompt them to seek places in the towns,—and so they go on scrubbing and scouring, and lending a hand in the harvest-field, till they are married to some young fellow, who takes a cottage and sets up day-labourer. This is their life; and the men’s is just similar. As soon as they can run about, they are set to watch a gate that stands at the end of the lane or the common to stop cattle from straying, and there through long solitary days they pick up a few halfpence by opening it for travellers. They are sent to scare birds from corn just sown, or just ripening, where

They stroll, the lonely Crusoes of the fields—

as Bloomfield has beautifully described them from his own experience. They help to glean, to gather potatoes, to pop beans into holes in dibbling time, to pick hops, to gather up apples for the cider-mill, to gather mushrooms and blackberries for market, to herd flocks of geese, or young turkeys, or lambs at weaning time; they even help to drive sheep to market, or to the wash at shearing time; they can go to the town with a huge pair of clouted ancle-boots to be mended, as you may see them trudging along over the moors, or along the footpath of the fields, with the strings of the boots tied together, and slung over the shoulder—one boot behind and the other before; and then they are very useful to lift and carry about the farm-yard, to shred turnips, or beet-root—to hold a sack open—to bring in wood for the fire, or to rear turfs for drying on the moors, as the man cuts them with his paring shovel, or to rear peat-bricks for drying. They are mighty useful animals in their day and generation, and as they get bigger, they successively learn to drive plough, and then to hold it; to drive the team, and finally to do all the labours of a man. That is the growing up of a farm-servant. All this time he is learning his business, but he is learning nothing else,—he is growing up into a tall, long, smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ancle-booted fellow, with a gait as graceful as one of his own plough-bullocks. He has grown up, and gone to service; and there he is, as simple, as ignorant, and as laborious a creature as one of the wagon-horses that he drives. The mechanic sees his weekly newspaper over his pipe and pot; but the clodhopper, the chopstick, the hawbuck, the hind, the Johnny-raw, or by whatever name, in whatever district, he may be called, is every where the same; he sees no newspaper, and if he did, he could not read it; and if he hears his master reading it, ten to one but he drops asleep over it. In fact, he has no interest in it. He knows there is such a place as the next town, for he goes there to statutes, and to the fair; and he has heard of Lunnon, and the French, and Buonaparte, and of late years of America, and he has some dreamy notion that he should like to go there if he could raise the wind, and thought he could find the way—and that is all that he knows of the globe and its concerns, beyond his own fields. The mechanic has his library, and he reads, and finds that he has a mind, and a hundred tastes and pleasures that he never dreamed of before; the clodhopper has no library, and if he had, books in his present state would be to him only so many things set on end upon shelves. He is as much of an animal as air and exercise, strong living and sound sleeping, can make him, and he is nothing more. Just see the daily course of his life. Harvest-time is the jubilee of his year. It is a time of incessant and hurrying occupation—but that is a benefit to him—it is an excitement, and he wants exciting. It rouses him out of that beclouded and unimaginative dreamy state in which he stalks along the solitary fields, or wields the flail in the barn; digs the drain or the ditch, or plashes the fence, from day to day and week to week. The energies that he has, and they are chiefly physical, are all called forth. He is in a bustle. The weather is fine and warm—his blood flows quicker. The gates are thrown open—the hay rustles in the meadow, or the golden corn stands in shock amid the stubble: the wagons are rattling along the lanes and the fields. His neighbours are all called out to assist. The labourers leave every thing else, and are all in the harvest-field. The women leave their cottages, and are there too. Young, middle-aged, and old,—all are there, to work or to glean. The comely maiden with her rosy face, her beaming eyes, and fair figure, brings with her mirth and joke. The stout village matrons have drawn footless stockings on their arms to protect them from the sun and stubble—they have pinned up their bed-gowns behind, or doffed themselves to the brown stays and linsey-woolsey petticoat, and are amongst the best hands in the field. Even the old are feebly pulling at a rake, or putting hay into wain-row, or looking on, and telling what they have done in their time. The beer-keg is in the field, and the horn often goes round. The lunch is eaten under the tree, or amongst the sheaves. In the house at noon, there is a great setting out of dinner; beans and bacon, huge puddings and dumplings are plentiful,—it is a joyous and a stirring time. There is no other season of the year in which the farm-servant enjoys himself so much as in harvest; not even in his few other days of relaxation—on his visit to the fair, to the statutes, to the ploughing match, or on Mothering Sunday, when all the “servant-lads” and “servant-wenches” are, in some parts of the country, set at liberty for a day, to go and see their mothers. See him at any other time, and what a plodding, simple, monotonous life he leads! He rises at an early hour—we have seen in this chapter at what an hour the Rev. Mr. Robinson had his men up;—if he be going to work in the farm-yard, he goes out and gets to it till breakfast-time: but if he be going to plough, or to do work at a distance, or to carry corn home that has been sold at market by his master, or to fetch bones, rape-dust, or other manure from the town, or coals from the pit, he is up, whether it be summer or winter, at an hour at which townspeople are often not gone to bed. In early spring, and autumn he gets up to plough at five and six o’clock in a morning. It is pitch dark, and dismally cold. He strikes a light with his tinder, for lucifers he never saw, and has only heard of, as a horrible invention for setting ricks on fire. He slips on his ancle-boots without lacing them, and out he goes to fodder his horses, and rub them down. That done, he comes in again.

The “servant wench” has lit the fire and set out his breakfast for him and his fellows; huge basins of milk porridge, and loaves as big as beehives, and pretty much of the same shape, and as brown as the back of their own hands. To this fare he betakes himself with a capacity that only country air and hard labour can give. Having made havoc with as much of these as would serve a round family of citizens to breakfast, he then stretches out his hand to a capacious dish of cold fat bacon of about six inches thick; nay, I once saw bacon on such a table actually ten inches thick, and all one solid mass of fat. This is set on the top of half a peck of cold boiled beans that were left the day before, and however strange such viands might seem to a townsman at six o’clock, or earlier, in a morning, they vanish as rapidly as if they did not follow that mess of porridge, and those huge hunches of bread. Well, to a certainty he has now done. Nay, don’t be in such haste—he has not done; he has his eye on the great brown loaf again. He must have a snack of bread and cheese; so he takes his knife out of his waistcoat pocket, a gigantic clasp knife, assuredly made by the knowing Sheffielder to hew down such loaves, and lie in such pockets, and fill such stomachs, and for no other earthly purpose. See! he cuts a massy fragment of the rich curly kissing-crust, that hangs like a fretted cornice from the upper half of the loaf, and places it between the little finger and the thick of his left hand; he cuts a corresponding piece of cheese, and places it between the thumb and the two fore-fingers of the same hand, and alternately cutting his bread and cheese with his clasp-knife (for he would not use another for that purpose on any account), as Betty sets a mug of ale before him, he wipes his mouth and says, as he lifts the mug, to his younger companion, who has all this time been faithfully and valiantly imitating him,—“Well, Jack, we must be off, lad; take a draught, then get the horses out, and I’ll be with thee.”

This is pretty well for five or six o’clock in a morning; but it is quite as likely that it is only one or two in the morning, as it certainly is, if he be going to a distance with a load, or for a load of any thing. The breakfast is as liberally handled, and Betty mean time has put up their luncheons or “ten-o’clocks”—huge masses of bread and cheese, or cold bacon, or cold meat, and a bottle of ale if they are going to plough. Having now breakfasted, he has only to lace his boots, which he generally does in the most inconvenient posture, and not before he has filled himself till it is tenfold additionally inconvenient—so with a face into which all the blood in his body seems to rush, and with many a grunt, he accomplishes his task, and away he goes;—his whip cracks, his gears jingle, his wagon rumbles, and he is gone. If, however, he be going to plough, he will duly about eleven o’clock lunch under a tree, while his horses rest and eat their hay; and then, at three or four o’clock, he will loose them from the plough, and return home to a dinner as plentiful as his breakfast; his horses are fed, and he goes to bed. If he be going out with corn, or for coals, he is off, as I have said, probably by two o’clock, and in his wagon he duly takes with him a truss of hay and a truss of straw. The hay is for his horses to eat at some wayside public-house, and the straw is for payment for their standing in the stable. The straw is worth a shilling, and in some places, at certain seasons, eighteen-pence. If he does not take straw, he takes a shilling in money. He carries his luncheon and eats it in the alehouse, and he has a shilling for himself and companion to drink, and treat the hostler. This is a custom as old as farms and corn-mills themselves. If it be winter weather, you shall meet him, probably, with straw-bands wrapped round his legs, or even round his hat for warmth; and in heavy rain his Macintosh is a sack-bag, which he throws over his shoulders, and goes on defying the weather for a whole day. In sudden squalls and thunder showers in summer, you may see him, and frequently a whole cluster of harvesters, take shelter under his wagon till the storm is over. By the evening fire, in some farm-houses, they mend their shoes, or shape and polish the heads of flails which they have cut from the black-thorn bush, and have had in a loft or under their bed seasoning for the last six months, or they get into some horse-play, or they doze

Till chilblains wake them, or the snapping fire.

And on Sundays they go to church in the morning to get a quiet nod. Perhaps it is to them that the Apostle alludes when he says—“And your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” For the only chance of their worship seems to be in their dreams—the daily exposure to the air on the six days making them as drowsy as bats on the seventh. In the afternoon they lean over gates, or play at quoits:—and there is the life of a farmer man-servant, till he is metamorphosed into a labourer by marrying and setting up his cottage, finding himself, and receiving weekly instead of yearly wages. Such is the farm-servant, whether you see him in his white, his blue, his tawny, or his olive-green smock-frock, in his straw-hat, or his wide-awake, according to the prevailing fashion of different parts of the country—and truly, seeing him and his fellows, we may ask with Wordsworth—

What kindly warmth from touch of fostering hand,
What penetrating power of sun or breeze
Shall e’er dissolve the crust wherein his soul
Sleeps, like a caterpillar sheathed in ice?
This torpor is no pitiable work
Of modern ingenuity; no town
Or crowded city may be taxed with aught
Of sottish vice, or desperate breach of law,
To which in after years he may be roused.
This boy the fields produce:—his spade and hoe—
The carter’s whip that on his shoulder rests,
In air high-towering with a boorish pomp,
The sceptre of his sway: his country’s name,
Her equal rights, her churches and her schools—
What have they done for him? And, let me ask,
For tens of thousands, uninformed as he?[3]

[3] Who would believe it, that such is the profound ignorance amongst the peasantry even of the Cumberland hills—amongst that peasantry where Wordsworth himself has found his Michaels, his Matthews, and many another man and woman that in his hands have become classical and enduring specimens of rustic heart and mind, that such facts as the following could occur, and yet this did occur there not very long ago. The “statesmen,” that is, small proprietors there, are a people very little susceptible of religious excitement; and, we may believe, have, in past years, been very much neglected by their natural instructors. You hear of no “revivals” amongst them, and the Methodists have little success amongst them. Some person, speaking with the wife of one of these “statesmen” on religious subjects, found that she had not even heard of such a person as Jesus Christ! Astonished at the discovery, he began to tell her of his history; of his coming to save the world, and of his being put to death. Having listened to all this very attentively, she inquired where this occured; and that being answered, she asked, “and when was it?” this being also told her, she very gravely observed—“Well, its sae far off, and sae lang since, we’ll fain believe that it isna true!”

CHAPTER IV.
THE BONDAGE SYSTEM OF THE NORTH OF ENGLAND.

A person from the south or midland counties of England, journeying northward, is struck when he enters Durham, or Northumberland, with the sight of bands of women working in the fields under the surveillance of one man. One or two such bands, of from half a dozen to a dozen women, generally young, might be passed over; but when they recur again and again, and you observe them wherever you go, they become a marked feature of the agricultural system of the country, and you naturally inquire how it is that such regular bands of female labourers prevail there. The answer, in the provincial tongue, is—“O they are the Boneditchers,” i. e. Bondagers. Bondagers! that is an odd sound, you think, in England. What, have we bondage, a rural serfdom, still existing in free and fair England? Even so. The thing is astounding enough, but it is a fact. As I cast my eyes for the first time on these female bands in the fields, working under their drivers, I was, before making any inquiry respecting them, irresistibly reminded of the slave-gangs of the West Indies: turnip-hoeing, somehow, associated itself strangely in my brain with sugar-cane dressing; but when I heard these women called Bondagers, the association became tenfold strong.

On all the large estates in these counties, and in the south of Scotland, the bondage system prevails. No married labourer is permitted to dwell on these estates unless he enters into bond to comply with this system. These labourers are termed hinds. Small houses are built for them on the farms, and on some of the estates—as those of the Duke of Northumberland—all these cottages are numbered, and the number is painted on the door. A hind, therefore, engaging to work on one of the farms belonging to the estate, has a house assigned him. He has 4l. a year in money; the keep of a cow; his fuel found him,—a prescribed quantity of coal, wood, or peat, to each cottage; he is allowed to plant a certain quantity of land with potatoes; and has thirteen boles of corn furnished him for his family consumption; one-third being oats, one-third barley, and one-third peas. In return for these advantages, he is bound to give his labour the year round, and also to furnish a woman labourer at 1s. per day during harvest, and 8d. per day for the rest of the year. Now it appears, at once, that this is no hereditary serfdom—such a thing could not exist in this country; but it is the next thing to it, and no doubt has descended from it; being serfdom in its mitigated form, in which alone modern notions and feelings would tolerate it. It may even be said that it is a voluntary system; that it is merely married hinds doing that which unmarried farm-servants do everywhere else—hire themselves on certain conditions from year to year. The great question is, whether these conditions are just, and favourable to the social and moral improvement of the labouring class. Whether, indeed, it be quite of so voluntary a nature as, at first sight, appears; whether it be favourable to the onward movement of the community in knowledge, virtue, and active and enterprising habits. These are questions which concern the public; and these I shall endeavour to answer in that candid and dispassionate spirit which public good requires.

In the first place, then, it is only just to say that their cottages, though they vary a good deal on different estates, are in themselves, in some cases, not bad. Indeed, some of those which we entered on the estates of the Duke of Northumberland, were much more comfortable than labourers’ cottages often are. Each has its number painted on the door, within a crescent,—the crest of the Northumberland family; and though this has a look rather savouring too much of a badge of servitude, yet within many of them are very comfortable. They are all built pretty much on one principle, and that very different to the labourers’ houses of the south. They are copied, in fact, from the Scotch cottages. They are of one story, and generally of one room. On one side is the fireplace, with an oven on one hand and a boiler on the other; on the opposite side of the cottage is the great partition for the beds, which are two in number, with sliding doors or curtains. The ceiling is formed by poles nailed across from one side of the roof to the other, about half a yard above where it begins to slope, and covered with matting. From the matting to the wall the slope is covered with a piece of chintz in the best cottages; in others, with some showy calico print, with ordinary wall-paper, or even with paper daubed with various colours and patterns. This is the regular style of the hind’s cottage; varying in neatness and comfort, it must be confessed, however, from one another by many degrees. Many are very naked, dirty, and squalid. Where they happen to stand separate, on open heaths, and in glens of the hills, nature throws around them so much of wild freedom and picturesqueness as makes them very agreeable. The cottages of the shepherds are often very snug and curious. We went into the cottage of the herd of Middleton, at the foot of the Cheviots, an estate formerly belonging to Greenwich Hospital. This hut was of more than ordinary size, as it was required to accommodate several shepherds. The part of the house on your left as you entered was divided into two rooms. The one was a sort of entrance lobby, where stood the cheese-press and the pails, and where hung up various shepherds’ plaids, great coats, and strong shoes. In one place hung a mass of little caps with strings to them, ready to tie upon the sheeps’ heads when they become galled by the fly in summer; in another were suspended wool-shears and crooks. The other little room was the dairy, with the oddest assemblage of wooden quaighs or little pails imaginable. Over these rooms, a step-ladder led to an open attic in the roof, which formed at once the sleeping apartment of the shepherds and a store-room. Here were three or four beds, some of them woollen mattresses on rude stump-bedsteads; others pieces of wicker-work, like the lower half of a pot-crate cut off, about half a yard high, filled with straw, and a few blankets laid upon it. There were lots of fleeces of wool stowed away; and lasts and awls stuck into the spars, shewed that the herds occasionally amused their leisure in winter and bad weather by cobbling their shoes. The half of the house on your right hand on entering, was at all points such as I have before described, with its coved and matted ceiling, its chintz cornice, and its two beds with sliding doors. But the majority of the cottages of the hinds about the great farm-houses, are dismal abodes. They are generally built in a low, and sometimes in a dreary quadrangle, without those additions of gardens, piggeries, etc., which so much enrich and embellish the cottages of the labourers in many parts of the kingdom. And what is the state of feeling within? is it that of contentment or acquiescence? I am bound to say that many inquiries made in various places, discovered one general sentiment of discontent with the system. But in the first place, let us take a view of the general aspect of the country under this system as it appears to a stranger from the south, and here we have at hand the graphic descriptions of Cobbett, from his tour in Scotland and the northern counties of England, in 1832.

He does not seem to have become aware of the existence of the system while in Durham and Northumberland. He perceived, what no man can pass through those counties without seeing, the large-farm system in full operation, and with all its consequences in its face. “From Morpeth to within four miles of Hexham the land is very indifferent; the farms of an enormous extent. I saw in one place more than a hundred corn-stacks in one yard, each having from six to seven Surrey wagon-loads of sheaves in one stack; and not another house to be seen within a mile or two of the farm-house. There appears to be no such thing as barns, but merely a place to take in a stack at a time, and thrash it out by a machine. The country seems to be almost wholly destitute of people: immense tracts of corn land, but neither cottages nor churches.” p. 56. This was the first glimpse of the thing; it had not yet broken fully upon him; but he had not gone much further before the vast solitude of the depopulative system began to press upon his brain, and to set those indignant feelings and theorizings at work in him, which belonged so peculiarly to his nature. “From Morpeth to Alnwick, the country, generally speaking, is very poor as to land, scarcely any trees at all; the farms enormously extensive: only two churches, I think, in the whole of the twenty miles, i. e. from Newcastle to Alnwick. Scarcely any thing worthy the name of a tree, and not one single dwelling having the appearance of a labourer’s house. Here appears to be neither hedging nor ditching; no such thing as a sheep-fold or a hurdle to be seen; the cattle and sheep very few in number; the farm-servants living in the farm-houses, and very few of them; the thrashing done by machinery and horses; a country without people. This is a pretty country to take a minister from, to govern the south of England! a pretty country to take a Lord Chancellor from, to prattle about poor-laws, and about surplus population! My Lord Grey has, in fact, spent his life here, and Brougham has spent his life in the inns of court, or in the botheration of speculative books. How should either of them know any thing about the eastern, southern, or western counties? I wish I had my dignitary, Dr. Black, here; I would soon make him see that he has all these number of years been talking about the bull’s horns instead of his tail and buttocks. Besides the indescribable pleasure of having seen Newcastle, the Shieldses, Sunderland, Durham, and Hexham, I have now discovered the true ground of all the errors of the Scotch feelosophers, with regard to population, and with regard to poor-laws. The two countries are as different as any things of the same nature can possibly be; that which applies to the one does not at all apply to the other. The agricultural counties are covered all over with parish churches, and with people thinly distributed here and there. Only look at the two counties of Dorset and Durham. Dorset contains 1005 square miles; Durham contains 1061 square miles. Dorset has 271 parishes; Durham has 75 parishes. The population of Dorset is scattered all over the whole county; there being no town of any magnitude in it. The population of Durham, though larger than that of Dorset, is almost all gathered together at the mouths of the Tyne, the Wear, and the Tees. Northumberland has 1871 square miles; and Suffolk has 1512 square miles. Northumberland has eighty-eight parishes; and Suffolk has five hundred and ten parishes. So here is a county one-third part smaller than that of Northumberland, with six times as many villages in it! What comparison is there to be made between states of society so essentially different? What rule is there, with regard to population and poor-laws, which can apply to both cases? * * * Blind and thoughtless must that man be, who imagines that all but farms in the south are unproductive. I much question whether, taking a strip three miles each way from the road, coming from Newcastle to Alnwick, an equal quantity of what is called waste ground in Surrey, together with the cottages that skirt it, do not exceed such strip of ground in point of produce. Yes; the cows, pigs, geese, poultry, gardens, bees, and fuel that arise from these wastes, far exceed, even in the capacity of sustaining people, similar breadths of ground, distributed into these large farms, in the poorer parts of Northumberland. I have seen not less than ten thousand geese in one tract of common, in about six miles, going from Chobham towards Farnham in Surrey. I believe these geese alone, raised entirely by care and the common, to be worth more than the clear profit that can be drawn from any similar breadth of land between Morpeth and Alnwick.”

There are two important particulars connected with this statement: one regards the sustenance of life, and the other morals. Much has been said of the morals of the hinds of Northumberland under this system, and in the main their morals may be good; but one or two facts I can state, as it regards the morals of the common people in general in both counties. In going over this very ground, of which Cobbett has been speaking, we witnessed such a scene as we never witnessed in any other part of England. We had taken our places in an afternoon coach, going from Newcastle to Morpeth. It was market-day, and we had not proceeded far out of Newcastle when we found that the coach in which we were, had actually two-and-thirty passengers. They consisted of country-people returning from market, who were taken up principally on the road. There were nine inside, and twenty-three outside; six of whom sat piled on each other’s knees, on the driving-box! The greater part of them were drunk; and the number of tipsy fellows staggering along the road, exceeded what we ever saw in any other quarter. We happened to be too at Alnwick fair, and we never saw the farmers and drovers more freely indulge in drink and noise. Moreover, from Alnwick to Belford we had a wealthy farmer in the coach, who was raving drunk, shouted out of the windows, chafed like a wild beast in a cage, and presented a spectacle such as I have never seen in a coach elsewhere. So much for the morals of that region.

But Cobbett had not yet seen the finest lands, or got a glimpse of the Bondage System. He still goes on expressing his astonishment at the solitude, the vast farms with their steam thrashing-machines; “so that the elements seem to be pressed into the amiable service of sweeping the people from the earth, in order that the whole amount may go into the hands of a small number of persons, that they may squander it at London, Paris, or Rome.” It was only after he had traversed the Lothians that the full discovery broke upon him; so that, after all, he never seems to have perceived that the Bondage System was prevalent in England, but speaks of it as exclusively a Scotch system. There is every reason to believe it a relic of ancient feudalism; but it is certain that but for the doctrines of the Edinburgh Economists it would have long ago vanished from our soil. When Cobbett arrived at Edinburgh, there he seemed to take breath, and clear his lungs for a good tirade against the system; which he does thus, in his first letter to the Chopsticks of the south. “This city is fifty-six miles from the Tweed, which separates England from Scotland. I have come through the country in a post-chaise, stopped one night upon the road, and have made every inquiry, in order that I might be able to ascertain the exact state of the labourers on the land. With the exception of about seven miles, the land is the finest that I ever saw in my life, though I have seen every fine vale in every county in England, and in the United States of America. I never saw any land a tenth-part so good. You will know what the land is, when I tell you that it is by no means uncommon for it to produce seven English quarters of wheat upon one English acre; and forty tons of turnips upon one English acre; and that there are, almost in every half mile, from fifty to a hundred acres of turnips in one piece, sometimes white turnips, and sometimes Swedes; all in rows, as straight as a line, and without a weed to be seen in any of these beautiful fields.

“Oh! how you will wish to be here! ‘Lord,’ you will say to yourselves, ‘what pretty villages there must be; what nice churches and churchyards. Oh! and what preciously nice alehouses! Come, Jack, let us set off to Scotland! What nice gardens we shall have to our cottages there! What beautiful flowers our wives will have, climbing up about the windows, and on both sides of the paths leading from the wicket up to the door! And what prancing and barking pigs we shall have running out upon the common, and what a flock of geese grazing upon the green!’

“Stop! stop! I have not come to listen to you, but to make you listen to me. Let me tell you, then, that there is neither village, nor church, nor alehouse, nor garden, nor cottage, nor flowers, nor pig, nor goose, nor common, nor green; but the thing is thus:—1. The farms of a whole county are, generally speaking, the property of one lord. 2. They are so large, that the corn-stacks frequently amount to more than a hundred upon one farm, each stack having in it, on an average, from fifteen to twenty English quarters of corn. 3. The farmer’s house is a house big enough and fine enough for a gentleman to live in; the farm-yard is a square, with buildings on the sides of it for horses, cattle, and implements; the stack-yard is on one side of this, the stacks all in rows, and the place as big as a little town. 4. On the side of the farm-yard next to the stack-yard, there is a place to thrash the corn in; and there is, close by this, always a thrashing-machine, sometimes worked by horses, sometimes by water, sometimes by wind, and sometimes by steam, there being no such thing as a barn or a flail in the whole country.

“‘Well,’ say you, ‘but out of such a quantity of corn, and of beef, and of mutton, there must some come to the share of the chopsticks, to be sure!’ Don’t be too sure yet; but hold your tongue, and hear my story. The single labourers are kept in this manner: about four of them are put into a shed, quite away from the farm-house, and out of the farm-yard; which shed, Dr. Jameson, in his Dictionary, calls a ‘boothie,’ a place, says he, where labouring servants are lodged. A boothie means a little booth; and here these men live and sleep, having a certain allowance of oat, barley, and pea meal, upon which they live, mixing it with water, or with milk when they are allowed the use of a cow, which they have to milk themselves. They are allowed some little matter of money besides, to buy clothes with, but never dream of being allowed to set foot within the walls of the farm-house. They hire for the year, under very severe punishment in case of misbehaviour, or quitting service; and cannot have fresh service, without a character from the last master, and also from the minister of the parish!

“Pretty well that for a knife and fork chopstick of Sussex, who has been used to sit round the fire with the master and mistress, and pull about and tickle the laughing maids! Pretty well that! But it is the life of the married labourer that will delight you. Upon a steam-engine farm, there are perhaps eight or ten of these. There is, at a considerable distance from the farm-yard, a sort of barrack erected for these to live in. It is a long shed, stone walls and pantile roof, and divided into a certain number of boothies, each having a door and one little window, all the doors being on one side of the shed, and there being no back-doors; no such thing, for them, appears ever to be thought of. The ground in front of the shed is wide or narrow according to circumstances, but quite smooth; merely a place to walk upon. Each distinct boothie is about seventeen feet one way, and fifteen feet the other way, as nearly as my eye could determine. There is no ceiling, and no floor but the earth. In this place, a man and his wife and family have to live. When they go into it there is nothing but the four bare walls, and the tiles over their head, and a small fireplace. To make the most of the room, they at their own cost erect berths, like those in a barrack-room, which they get up into when they go to bed; and here they are, a man, and his wife, and a parcel of children, squeezed up in this miserable hole, with their meal and their washing tackle, and all their other things; and yet it is quite surprising how decent the women endeavour to keep the place. These women, for I found all the men out at work, appeared to be most industrious creatures, to be extremely obliging, and of good disposition; and the shame is, that they are permitted to enjoy so small a portion of the fruit of all their labours, of all their cares.

“But if their dwelling-places be bad, their food is worse, being fed upon exactly that which we feed hogs and horses upon. The married man receives in money about four pounds for the whole year: and he has besides sixty bushels of oats, thirty bushels of barley, twelve bushels of peas, and three bushels of potatoes, with ground allowed him to plant the potatoes. The master gives him the keep of a cow the year round; but he must find the cow himself; he pays for his own fuel; he must find a woman to reap for twenty whole days in the harvest, as payment for the rent of his boothie. He has no wheat,—the meal altogether amounts to about six pounds for every day in the year; the oatmeal is eaten in porridge; the barley-meal and pea-meal are mixed together, and baked into a sort of cakes, upon an iron plate put over the fire; they sometimes get a pig, and feed it upon the potatoes.

“Thus they never have one bit of wheaten bread, or of wheaten flour, nor of beef, nor mutton, though the land is covered with wheat and with cattle. The hiring is for a year, beginning on the 26th of May, and not at Michaelmas. The farmer takes the man just at the season to get the sweat out of him; and if he dies, he dies when the main work is done. The labourer is wholly at the mercy of the master, who, if he will not keep him beyond the year, can totally ruin him, by refusing him a character. The cow is a thing more in name than in reality; she may be about to calve when the 26th of May comes: the wife may be in such a situation as to make removal perilous to her life. This family has no home; and no home can any man be said to have, who can thus be dislodged every year of his life at the will of his master. It frequently happens, that the poor creatures are compelled to sell their cow for next to nothing; and, indeed, the necessity of character from the last employer, makes the man a real slave, worse off than the negro by many degrees; for here there is neither law to ensure him relief, nor motive in the master to attend to his health, or to preserve his life.

“Six days from daylight to dark these good, and laborious, and patient, and kind people labour. On an average they have six English miles to go to church. Here are therefore twelve miles to walk on Sunday; and the consequence is, that they very seldom go. But, say you, what do they do with all the wheat, and all the beef, and all the mutton? and what becomes of all the money that they are sold for? Why, the cattle and sheep walk into England upon their legs; the wheat is put into ships to be sent to London or elsewhere; and as to the money, the farmer is allowed to have a little of it, but almost the whole of it is sent to the landlord, to be gambled, or otherwise squandered away at London, at Paris, or at Rome. The rent of the land is enormous; four, five, six, or seven pounds for an English acre. The farmer is not allowed to get much; almost the whole goes into the pockets of the lords; the labourers are their slaves, and the farmers their slave-drivers. The farm-yards are, in fact, factories for making corn and meat, carried on principally by the means of horses and machinery. There are no people; and these men seem to think that people are not necessary to a state. I came over a tract of country a great deal bigger than the county of Suffolk, with only three towns in it, and a couple of villages, while the county of Suffolk has 29 market-towns and 491 villages. Yet our precious government seems to wish to reduce England to the state of this part of Scotland; and you are abused and reproached, and called ignorant, because you will not reside in a boothie, and live upon the food which we give to horses and hogs.” pp. 102-7.

This is the description of one of the most accurate observers of all that related to the working man that ever lived. Such is the comparison which he draws between the condition of the hinds, and of the southern chopsticks. Such is his opinion of the superior condition of the southern peasantry, that he says he would not be the man who should propose to one of them to adopt the condition of a hind, especially if the fellow should have a bill-hook in his hand. Cobbett’s description is as accurate as it is graphic. Let any one compare it with my own in the early part of this paper, made from personal observation in the summer of 1836. Such was the painful impression left upon Cobbett’s mind, that he reverts to it again and again. He tells us of a visit made to a farm near Dunfermline, and of the wretched abodes and food of the men he found there; but the last extract contains the substance of the Bondage System.

Let it be understood that the system to the Bondagers, so called, is no hardship. They are principally girls from sixteen to twenty years of age. Full of health and spirits, and glad enough to range over the farm fields in a troop, with a stout young fellow, laughing and gossiping,—the grievance is none of theirs; but the poor hind’s, who has to maintain them. Just when his family becomes large, and he has need of all his earnings to feed, and clothe, and educate his troop of children, then he is compelled to hire and maintain a woman to eat up his children’s food; and to take away in her wages that little pittance of cash that is allowed him, as many a wife with tears in her eyes has said, “to clothe the puir bairns and put them to school.” But the system is not without its injurious effect on the Bondager herself. It has been said that the Bondagers are of service in the hind’s cottage, but the wives over the whole space where the bondage system prevails tell you that the Bondagers are of little or no use in the house. They look upon themselves as hired to work on the farm, and they neither are very willing to work in the house, nor very capable. They get out-of-door tastes and habits; they loathe the confinement of the house; they dislike its duties. “They are fit only,” say the women, to “mind the bairns a bit about the door.” And this is one of the evils of the system. Instead of women brought up to manage a house, to care for children, to make a fireside comfortable, and to manage the domestic resources well, they come to housekeeping ignorant, unprepared, and in a great measure disqualified for it. They can hoe turnips and potatoes to a miracle, but know very little about the most approved methods of cooking them. They can rake hay better than comb children’s hair; drive a cart or a harrow with a better grace than rock a cradle, and help more nimbly in the barn than in the ingle.

The two points of most importance are those of the hind’s being compelled to have a character from the last master, and of being at his mercy, to turn him not only out of employ, but out of house and home. I think little of their having no wheaten flour. Many a hardy race of peasants, and even farmers, both in Scotland and England, in mountain districts, never see any thing in the shape of bread but oat-cake. In Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumberland, and the Peak of Derbyshire, there are thousands that would not thank you for wheaten bread. The girdle-cakes, as they call them, which the wives of the hinds make, of mixed barley and pea meal, I frequently ate of and enjoyed. They are about an inch thick, and eight or ten inches in diameter, and taste perceptibly of the pea. These, and milk, are a simple, but not a despicable food; but the fact, that these poor people must bring a character from the last master before they can be employed again, is one which may seem at first sight a reasonable demand, but is in fact the binding link of a most subtle and consummate slavery. I have seen the effect of this system in the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire collieries. There, amongst the master colliers, a combination was entered into, and for aught I know still exists, to regulate the price of coal, and the quantity each master should relatively get. This rule, that no man should be employed except he brought a character from his last master, was adopted; and what was the consequence? That every man was the bounden slave of him in whose employment he was; and that soon the price of coals was raised to three times their actual value, and the labour of the men restricted to about three half-days, or a day and a half, per week.

Let any one imagine a body of men bound by one common interest, holding in their possession all the population of several counties, and subjecting their men to this rule. Can there be a more positive despotism? The hind is at the mercy of the caprice, the anger, or the cupidity of the man in whose hand he is; and if he dismiss him, as I said in the early part of this paper, where is he to go? As Cobbett justly remarks, he has No Home; and nothing but utter and irretrievable ruin is before him. Such a condition is unfit for any Englishman; such power as that of the master no man ought to hold. A condition like this must generate a slavish character. Can that noble independence of feeling belong to a hind, which is the boast of the humblest Englishman, while he holds employment, home, character, everything at the utter mercy of another? I have now laid before the reader the combined evidence of my own observation and that of a great observer of the working classes, both in town and country, in the north and the south, and I leave it to the judgment of any man whether such a system is good or bad: but I cannot help picturing to myself what would be the consequence of the spread of this system of large farm and bondage all over England. Let us suppose, as we must in that case, almost all our working population cooped up in large towns in shops and factories, and all the country thrown into large farms to provide them with corn—what an England would it then be! The poetry and the picturesque of rural life would be annihilated; the delicious cottages and gardens, the open common, and the shouting of children would vanish; the scores of sweet old-fashioned hamlets, where an humble sociality and primitive simplicity yet remain, would no more be found; all those charms and amenities of country life, which have inspired poets and patriots with strains and with deeds that have crowned England with half her glory, would have perished; all that series of gradations of rank and character, from the plough-boy and the milk-maid, the free labourer, the yeoman, the small farmer, the substantial farmer, up to the gentleman, would have gone too;

And a bold peasantry, its country’s pride,

would be replaced by a race of stupid and sequacious slaves, tilling the solitary lands of vast landholders, who must become selfish and hardened in their natures, from the want of all those claims upon their better sympathies which the more varied state of society at present presents. The question, therefore, does not merely involve the comforts of the hind, but the welfare and character of the country at large; and I think no man who desires England not merely to maintain its noble reputation, but to advance in social wisdom and benevolence, can wish for the wider spread, or even the continuance of the Bondage System. I think all must unite with me in saying, let the very name perish from the plains of England, where it sounds like a Siberian word.[4] Let labour be free; and this Truck System of the agriculturists be abolished, not by Act of Parliament, but by public principle and sound policy. It is a system which wrongs all parties. It wrongs the hind, for it robs his children of comfort and knowledge; it wrongs the farmer, for what he saves in labour he pays in rent, while he gains only the character of a taskmaster; and it wrongs the landholder, for it puts his petty pecuniary interest into the balance against his honour and integrity; and causes him to be regarded as a tyrant, in hearts where he might be honoured as a natural protector, and revered as a father.

[4] Since the publication of the former edition of this work, I understand the name has been changed; that, in May 1839, it was agreed to call the Bondagers Woman’s-workers; a clumsy appellation, and which does not at all do away with anything more in the system than its name.

This account of the Bondage System in the first edition, excited, as was to be expected, a strong feeling in the public mind, both in the north and the south. In the south great surprise, for it was a system totally unknown to nine-tenths of readers; in the north great indignation on the part of the supporters of the system. I have received many conflicting statements from the Bondage district,—some thanking me for having made public so accurate a description of an objectionable system; others vindicating the system, and applauding it. I need not here notice those communications which accorded with my own personal observations and inquiries; but as my object is simply truth, I am more desirous to give a counter-statement, so that all readers may draw their own inferences. The most able, and in itself most interesting, defence of the system, I received from the lady of John Grey, Esq. of Dilstone House, Northumberland. Mr. Grey is well known as an active magistrate, an eminent agriculturist and promoter of the interests of the agricultural class; and Mrs. Grey is evidently a lady of a vigorous intellect and a noble nature. She is a native of Northumberland, proud of her county, and thoroughly persuaded of the excellence of its agricultural system. I regret that my space will not permit me to give more than a very summary notice of her vindication, nor more than a mere reference to the documents by Mr. Grey, Mr. Gilly of Norham, the author of the “Life of Felix Neff,” and Mr. Blackden of Ford Castle, which, however, may be found in Mr. Frederick Hill’s works on National Education, under the head of “Northern District.”

Mrs. Grey denies that Cobbett, though a graphic writer, is an accurate one. She denies that a character is required with a hind from his last master, but merely a certificate called “The Lines,” stating that he is free from his former service. She asserts that all hinds have gardens; and that Bondagers make good domestic servants, and wives. She reports that Mr. Grey only remembers two instances of his hinds receiving parochial relief, and adds that she never saw two instances of their own hinds being intoxicated.

But her description of the cottages of hinds and their way of life, is perfectly Arcadian. “In a glance at cottage life in Northumberland, such as 20 years of intimate observation has shewn it to me, let me introduce you into one of the ‘miserable holes’ where, according to Cobbett, this ‘slave population’ are ‘squeezed up.’ Observe, if you please, its furniture. There are a couple of neatly painted or fir-wood press-beds; a dresser and shelves, on which are ranged a goodly display of well-hoarded delf, or of modern blue-and-white Staffordshire ware. There is also a press or cupboard, in which are kept the nicer articles of food, and below which are drawers for the clothes of the family. A clock, in a handsome oaken case, ticks, not behind the door, but in some conspicuous situation; and, in many families, is added a mahogany half-chest of drawers for the female finery. I admit that the houses are generally too small, and the want of a back-door and a commodious second apartment, are great evils; but this is the landlord’s blame; and my object is only to shew that the hind, though esteemed by you ‘many degrees worse than a negro,’ has yet the means of making these insufficient abodes look most respectable and comfortable. The press-beds form a partition, behind which is a small space containing in one part a bed for the Bondager, and in another, a little dairy and pantry containing stores of meat, flour, etc. This space ought to be larger, and to form a second respectable apartment, but, such as it is, it is well filled with the necessaries of life, which is no small matter to the inhabitant. We might censure, too, the matted ceiling, were not the eye immediately attracted from it by the plentiful store of bacon which hangs below it, together with hanging shelves containing a supply of cheeses, pot-herbs, etc., and in other parts bunches of yarn ready for making into stockings or blankets. Then, as to clothing, the men on Sundays are both respectably and handsomely dressed, and the women,—yes, these very ‘slaves’, the Bondagers, may be seen with their light print or Merino gowns, their winter’s plaid, and their summer’s Thibet, or spun silk shawls; their Tuscan or Dunstable bonnets; and their open-work cotton stockings, or smart boots. A tawdry figure is a rare sight; the generality are comfortably and neatly attired, and their dress good in quality.

“When the ‘slave-gangs’ are at work in the fields under their ‘driver’ in winter, they are certainly a motley and uncouth group; many of them having on their fathers’ great coats, and others long woollen dresses, reaching to their ankles, above their other clothes, to defend them from the cold. But in summer, the jaunty air of their short white, or light cotton jackets, an article of dress which has somewhat the appearance of the waist of a lady’s riding-habit, with its open collar displaying a gay handkerchief beneath, with their pink or blue gingham petticoats, give them quite a picturesque appearance.

“I should like to shew you too, what a pleasant sight it is when you pay a visit of enquiry on the occasion of a birth. You will find the mother laid among her well-bleached sheets, and comfortable home-made blankets, surmounted by a gaily-patched quilt; and though you may be no admirer—as gentlemen seldom are—of new-born babies, yet, when the little thing is brought out of its snug cradle for your inspection, you cannot but cast an approving glance on its nicely-plaited cap, and the warm flannels and neatly made frock (often ornamented with braiding), which bespeak it the child of competence and comfort. The Bondager too is there, rather dressed for the occasion (though ‘said by the wives to be of little or no use to them’), it being customary for her to stay at home to look after the house and nurse the mother, till she is well enough to resume her duties. Should it be a first-born, you are invited to inspect the baby’s wardrobe, and there is little appearance of wretchedness in the sufficient stock of neat little garments ‘laid up in lavender’ for the little stranger. It is expected, too, that you should drink the child’s health, and a bottle of wine or spirits is produced from the cupboard, along with a noble cheese, and a loaf to match it, which it would be thought very ‘mean’ not to have to offer on such occasions.” Mrs. Grey luxuriates in descriptions of the “white loaf which the women always have, and the dainty white cake for tea, kneaded with butter or cream, when a friend comes to visit them; of the fat things with which their cows and their pigs overflow their dairy and larder; of their general good fare; and of the many days when the Bondager is not at field-work, but stays to spin, knit, wash and iron for the household,— always milking the cow, and frequently churning and making cheese.” She adds that the hinds’ wives make great profit of their butter, about 5l. a year; and that they have “great spinning matches, and spin all the woollen articles that they use.”

Mr. Grey in “Two Letters on the State of the Agricultural Interests, and the Condition of the Labouring Poor,” published by Ridgway, London, 1831, draws a similar picture, describing the hind’s cottage as “a scene of comfort and contentment.”

Now these hinds must be very unreasonable fellows. Spite of all their bounteous and Arcadian lot; spite of their cottages being “scenes of comfort and contentment,” they certainly were, as described in the preceding pages, found by us, in 1836, in a most discontented state. And since then they have turned out in great numbers, calling upon their employers to abolish the system. In public meetings held at Wooller, and elsewhere, they described their situation as wretched, and their average weekly gains at about 5s. 6³⁄₄d. Mr. L. Hindmarsh, in a paper on the Bondage System, read at Newcastle, in August, 1838, bears testimony to the great dissatisfaction of the hinds. Mr. Grey, in his pamphlet alluded to above, states, on the other hand, that the “conditions” of the hind, as they are called, were in 1831, the year of its publication, as follows; and that however the market-price may vary the quantities are invariably the same, and always of the very best quality; varying with the price of grain from £30 to £40 a year.

This is also exclusive of what the other branches of the family earn; the females receiving 10d. or 1s. a day generally, and 2s. or 2s. 6d. in harvest.

Besides the general discontent and turn-out just noticed, which Mrs. Grey attributes to the waywardness of human nature, we must introduce these facts. The morals of these districts have been highly extolled, and both Mr. and Mrs. Grey strongly reiterate the eulogium. Mrs. Grey does not recollect two instances of intoxication amongst the hinds in her life; we saw many one day, as already stated. In the Fourth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, even while advocating “the hinding system,” we find these singular paragraphs: “Whatever general merits may or may not otherwise have distinguished Northumberland and Durham from more pauperized districts, these counties must not lay claim to superiority in reference to bastardy, for in no part of England was bastardy more prevalent than in portions of this district, and in none was the practice of relief to the mother more pertinaciously upheld. The Newcastle parishes of All Saints’ and St. Andrews, together with the parishes of Sunderland and Berwick, are the only places we can call to mind where a weekly allowance for every legitimate child was not a matter of course.

“The difficulties of inducing children in competent circumstances to contribute to the support of their aged parents (whose maintenance the parish had hitherto taken off their hands), were quite as great, if not relatively greater, considering the wages of labour, in the north as in the south.”

So much for morals; now for the Arcadian cottages. The Newcastle Courant of November 23d, 1838, stated that “Thomas Dodds, Esq., surgeon, read a very valuable paper on ‘Improvement in Cottage Architecture, and the domestic comfort of the peasantry of North Northumberland.’ Mr. Dodds’ long personal observation, arising from his medical practice,” it is stated, “peculiarly qualified him for the discussion of this important and interesting subject,” and Mr. Dodds very summarily and pithily characterized these abodes as “a disgrace to Northumberland.” He contrasted them with “the splendid edifices, commemorative columns, and magnificent streets, which the people of Northumberland are raising.” He said, “The miserable tenements of numbers of this class are less carefully constructed than the stables of their horses, formed, as they are, in a majority of cases, of only one apartment, open to the roof, with earthen floor, and four-paned windows that dim the light of day, a part of which is often occupied by the cow; and where the decencies of life cannot be observed, there being no separate apartments for the females of the family, one of whom is often a stranger in the capacity of a servant to work ‘the bondage.’” He represented them equally detrimental to health as to comfort and morals; and gave many instances from personal observation, especially a case at that moment of a family of eight persons, near Alnwick, all lying ill of typhus fever in their one room with the corpse of one of them laid out in the midst of them. He added a ludicrous anecdote of a cow which, in the night, leaped, in some sudden fear, from its fastening behind the bed of a hind at Hawkhill, right through the bed, and alighted on the hearth, bringing the bed at one crash upon the people in it, and severely injuring the man’s wife. Mr. Dodds called the attention of his hearers to some cottages of the Duke of Northumberland erected at Brislee, as models for cottage architecture, and strongly urged that “the hinds should be no longer compelled to seek in sleep and oblivion the only solace of his cheerless dwelling,” but have “an ingle blinking bonnily,” where he might “spend his hours of relaxation in innocent amusements, or in reading books suited to his way of life.”

“A vote of thanks to Mr. Dodds for this address was moved by John Lambert, Esq., and carried by acclamation.”

What then are we to infer from these very conflicting statements? Why, that where the people are discontented, and the appeal to their wealthy neighbours on their behalf is received with acclamation,—the evil must be the actual condition, and the “cottage scenes of comfort and contentment,” the exceptions. Mrs. Grey admits that she “has endeavoured to present the sunny side of the picture as the reverse of my gloomy one.” I can well believe that she lives on the sunny side of humanity; and that her enlightened husband, and the most liberal portion of the agriculturists, so treat their hinds as to form the exception. It is only another proof of the wisdom of Pope’s words that “whate’er is best administered is best.” That, under a pure despotism, people may be perfectly happy if they happen to have a kind tyrant. That the hinds under the bondage system may be, moral, flourishing, and happy, when they have kind and sympathizing employers but that does not prove that the system itself has a tendency to such happy results, nor consequently remove our objections to it. Any condition of the people is good where Christian benevolence and enlightened regard are exercised towards them, and any system, even the bondage system, is better than that deadly neglect of the peasantry by the landowners, which too much prevails in many parts of the south.

CHAPTER V.
THE TERRORS OF A SOLITARY HOUSE.

The citizen who lives in a compact house in the centre of a great city; whose doors and windows are secured at night by bars, bolts, shutters, locks, and hinges of the most approved and patented construction; who, if he look out of doors, looks upon splendid rows of lamps; upon human habitations all about him; whose house can only be assailed behind by climbing over the tops of other houses; or before, by eluding troops of passengers and watchmen, whom the smallest alarm would hurry to the spot: I say, if such a man could be suddenly set down in one of our many thousand country houses, what a feeling of unprotected solitude would fall upon him. To sit by the fire of many a farm-house, or cottage, and hear the unopposed wind come sighing and howling about it; to hear the trees swaying and rustling in the gale, infusing a most forlorn sense of the absence of all neighbouring abodes; to look on the simple casements and the old-fashioned locks and bolts, and to think what would their resistance be to the determined attack of bold thieves;—I imagine it would give many such worthy citizen a new and not very enviable feeling. But if he were to step out before the door of such a house at nine or ten o’clock of a winter or autumnal night, what a state of naked jeopardy it would seem to stand in! Perhaps all solitary darkness;—nothing to be heard but the sound of neighbouring woods; or the roar of distant waters; or the baying of the ban-dogs at the scattered and far-off farm-houses; the wind puffing upon him with a wild freshness, as from the face of vast and solitary moors; or perhaps some gleam of moonlight, or the wild, lurid light which hovers in the horizon of a winter-night sky, revealing to him desolate wastes, or gloomy surrounding woods. In truth, there is many a sweet spot that, in summer weather, and by fair daylight, do seem very paradises; of which we exclaim, in passing, “Ay! there could I live and die, and never desire to leave it!” There are thousands of such sweet places, which, when night drops down, assume strange horrors, and make us wish for towers and towns, watchmen, walkers of streets, and gaslight. One seems to have no security in any thing. A single house five or six miles from a neighbour. Mercy! why it is the very place for a murder! What would it avail there to cry help! murder! Murder might be perpetrated a dozen times before help could come!

Just one such fancy as that, and what a prison! a trap! does such a place become to a fearful heart. We look on the walls, and think them slight as card-board; on the roof, and it becomes in our eyes no better than a layer of rushes. If we were attacked here, it were all over! This gimcrack tenement would be crushed in before the brawny hand of a thief. And to think of out-of-doors! Yes! of that pleasant out-of-doors, which in the day we glorified ourselves in. Those forest tracts of heath, and gorse, and flowering broom, where the trout hid themselves beneath the overhanging banks of the most transparent streams—ugh! they are now the very lurking-places of danger! What admirable concealment for liers-in-wait, are the deep beds of heather. How black do those bushes of broom and gorse look to a suspicious fancy! They are just the very things for lurking assassins to crouch behind. And what is worse, those woods! those woods that come straggling up to the very doors; putting forward a single tree here and there, as advanced guards of picturesque beauty in the glowing summer noon, or in the spring, when their leaves are all delicately new. Beauty! how could we ever think them beautiful, though we saw them stand in their assembled majesty; though they did tower aloft with their rugged, gashed, and deeply-indented stems, and make a sound as of many waters in their tops, and cast down pleasant shadows on the mossy turf beneath; and though the thrush and the nightingale did sing triumphantly in their thickets. Beautiful! they are horrible! Their blackness of darkness now makes us shudder. Their breezy roar is fearful beyond description. Let daylight and summer sunshine come, and make them look as pleasant as they will, we would not have a wood henceforward within a mile of us. Why, up to the walls of your house, under your very windows, may evil eyes now be glaring from behind those sturdy boles;—they seem to have grown there just to suit the purposes of robbery and murder. We look now to the dogs and guns for assistance, but they give us but cold comfort: for the guns only remind us that at this moment the muzzle of one may be at that chink in the shutter, at that hole out of which a knot has dropped, and in another moment we are in eternity! And the dogs!—see, they rise! they set up the bristles on their backs! they growl! they bark! our fears are true! the place is beset!

This may seem rather exaggerated, read by good daylight, or by the fire of a city hearth; but this is the natural spirit of the solitary house. It is that which many a one has felt. It has cured many a one of longing to live in a “sweet sequestered cot;” nay, it is the spirit felt by the naturalized inhabitants of such solitary places. I look upon such places to generate fears and superstitions too, in no ordinary degree. The inhabitants of solitary houses are often most arrant cowards; and for this there are many causes. A sense of exposure to danger if it be not lost by time, is more likely to generate timidity of disposition than courage. Then, the sound of woods and waters; the mysterious sighings and moanings, and lumberings, that winds and other causes occasion amongst the old walls and decayed roofs, and ill-fastened doors and casements of large old country houses, have a wonderful influence on the minds of the ignorant and simple, who pass their lives in the solitude of fields; and go to and fro between their homes and the scene of their duties, often through deep and lonesome dells, through deep, o’ershadowed lanes by night; by the cross-road, and over the dreary moor: all places of no good character. Superstitious legends hang all about such neighbourhoods; and traditions enough to freeze the blood of the ignorant, taint a dozen spots round every such place. In this field a girl was killed by her jealous, or only too favoured lover: to the boughs of that old oak, a man was found hanging: in that deep dark pool the poor blind fiddler was found drowned: in that old stone-quarry, and under that high cliff, deeds were done that have mingled a blackness with their name. Nay, in one such locality, the head of a woodman was found by some mowers returning in the evening from their work. There it lay in the green path of a narrow dingle, horrid and blackening in the sun. It was supposed to have been severed from the wretched man’s body with his own axe, by a band of poachers, who charged him with being a spy upon them. The body was found cast into a neighbouring marsh.

What lonely country but has these petrifying horrors? And is it wonderful that they have their effect on the simple peasantry? especially as they are the constant topics round the evening fire, along with a thousand haunted-house and churchyard stories; ghosts, and highway robberies, and

Horrid stabs in groves forlorn,
And murders done in caves.—Hood.

The very means of defence sometimes become the aggravators of their evils. The dogs and guns have added to the catalogue of their tales of horror. The dogs, as conscious of their solitary station as their masters, and with true canine instinct, feeling a great charge and responsibility upon them, set up the most clamourous barkings at the least noise in the night, and often seem to take a melancholy pleasure, a whole night through, in uttering such awful and long-spun howls as are seldom heard in more secure and cheerful situations. These are often looked upon as prognostics of family troubles, and occasion great fears. Who has not heard these dismal howlings at old halls, and been witness to the anxiety they occasioned? And, if a branch blown by the wind do but scrape against a pane, or an unlucky pig get into the garden, the dogs are all barking outrageously, and the family is up, in the certain belief that they are beset with thieves; and it has been no unfrequent circumstance, on retiring to rest again, that loaded pistols have been left about on tables, and the servants on coming down next morning, with that fatal propensity to sport with fire-arms, have playfully menaced, and actually shot one another in their rashness. Such a catastrophe occurred in the family of a relative of mine, on just such an occasion. But truly, the horrors and depredations which formerly were perpetrated in such places, were enough to make a solitary house a terrible sojourn in the night. A single cottage on a great heath; a toll-bar on a wild road, far from a town; a wealthy farm-house in a retired region; an old hall or grange, amongst gloomy woods. These were places in which such outrages were committed in former years as filled the newspapers of the time with continual details of terror; and would furnish volumes of the most dreadful stories. It is said that the diminution of highway robberies and stopping of mails, once so frequent, has been in a great measure occasioned by the system of banking and paper-money. Instead of travellers, carrying with them large bags of gold, a letter by post transmits a bill to any amount, which, if intercepted is of no use to the thief, because the fact is immediately notified to the bank, and payment prevented; and notes being numbered, makes it a matter of the highest risk to offer them, lest the public be apprized of the numbers, and the offender be secured. But the wonderful improvement of all our roads since the days of M‘Adam, the consequently increased speed of travelling—the increased population and cultivation of the country, all have combined to spoil the trade of the public plunderer. And the press, as in other respects so in this, has added a marvellous influence. Scarcely has a crime of any sort against society been committed, but it raises a hue and cry; handbills and paragraphs in newspapers are flying far and wide, and dexterous must be the offender who escapes. The house of a friend of mine was entered on a Sunday night, and by means of handbills four of the thieves were secured on the Monday, and tried and transported on the Tuesday. But fifty years ago this could not have been done in a country place. The traveller had to wade through mud and deep ruts, along our well-frequented roads; and if assailed it was impossible to fly. Desperate bands of thieves made nocturnal assaults upon solitary houses; and, long ere a hue and cry could be raised, they had vanished into woods and heaths, or had fled beyond the slow flight of lumbering mails, and newspapers that did not reach their readers sometimes for a fortnight. Those were the times for fearful tragedies in lonely dwellings, which even yet furnish thrilling themes for winter firesides.

There is an account of the attack of the house of Colonel Purcell, which appeared in the newspapers at the time, and was twice reprinted in the Kaleidoscope, a Liverpool literary paper; the last time soon after the gallant Colonel’s death, in 1822, which, although it belongs to Ireland, a country whence not volumes, but whole libraries of such recitals might be imported, I shall insert here, because it so well illustrates the sort of horrors to which lonely houses were, in this country, formerly very much exposed; and from which they are not now entirely exempt; and because perhaps no greater instance of manly courage is upon record. A similar one, of female intrepidity, in a young woman who defended a toll-bar, in which she was alone, against a band of thieves, and shot several of them, I recollect seeing some years ago in the newspapers.

EXTRAORDINARY INTREPIDITY OF SIR JOHN PURCELL.

At the Cork Assizes, Maurice Noonan stood indicted for a burglary, and attempting to rob the house of Sir John Purcell, at Highfort, on the night of the 11th of March, 1812.

Sir John Purcell said, that, on the night of the 11th of March last, after he had retired to bed, he heard some noise outside the window of his parlour. He slept on the ground-floor, in a room immediately adjoining the parlour. There was a door from one room into the other; but this having been found inconvenient, and there being another passage from the bed-chamber more accommodating, it was nailed up, and some of the furniture of the parlour placed against it. Shortly after Sir John heard the noise in the front of his house, the windows of the parlour were dashed in, and the noise, occasioned by the feet of the robbers in leaping from the windows down upon the floor, appeared to denote a gang not less than fourteen in number, as it struck him. He immediately got out of bed; and the first resolution he took being to make resistance, it was with no small mortification that he reflected upon the unarmed condition in which he was placed, being destitute of a single weapon of the ordinary sort. In this state he spent little time in deliberation, as it almost immediately occurred to him, that, having supped in the bed-chamber on that night, a knife had been left behind by accident, and he instantly proceeded to grope in the dark for this weapon, which happily he found, before the door leading from the parlour into the bed-chamber had been broken. While he stood in calm but resolute expectation that the progress of the robbers would soon lead them to the bed-chamber, he heard the furniture which had been placed against the nailed-up door, expeditiously displaced, and immediately afterwards the door was burst open. The moon shone with great brightness, and when the door was thrown open, the light streaming in through three large windows in the parlour, afforded Sir John a view that might have made an intrepid spirit not a little apprehensive. His bed-room was darkened to excess, in consequence of the shutters of the windows, as well as the curtains being closed; and thus while he stood enveloped in darkness, he saw standing before him, by the brightness of the moonlight, a body of men well armed; and of those who were in the van of the gang, he observed that a few were blackened. Armed only with this case-knife, and aided only by a dauntless heart, he took his station by the side of the door, and in a moment after one of the villains entered from the parlour into the dark room. Instantly upon advancing, Sir John plunged the knife at him, the point of which entered under the right arm, and in a line with the nipple, and so home was the blow sent, that the knife passed into the robber’s body, until Sir John’s hand stopped its further progress. Upon receiving this thrust, the villain reeled back into the parlour, crying out blasphemously that he was killed; and shortly after another advanced, who was received in a similar manner, and who also staggered back into the parlour, crying out that he was wounded. A voice from the outside gave orders to fire into the dark room. Upon which, a man stepped forward with a short gun in his hand, which had the butt broke off at the small, and which had a piece of cord tied round the barrel and stock near the swell. As this fellow stood in the act to fire, Sir John had the amazing coolness to look at his intended murderer, and without betraying any audible emotion whatever, which might point out the exact spot which he was standing in, he calmly calculated his own safety from the shot which was preparing for him. He saw that the contents of the piece were likely to pass close to his breast without menacing him with, at least, any serious wound, and in this state of pain and manly expectation, he stood without flinching until the piece was fired, and its contents harmlessly lodged in the wall. It was loaded with a brace of bullets and three slugs. As soon as the robber fired, Sir John made a pass at him with the knife, and wounded him in the arm, which he repeated again in a moment with similar effect; and as the others had done, the villain after being wounded, retired, exclaiming that he was wounded. The robbers immediately rushed forward from the parlour into the dark room, and then it was that Sir John’s mind recognised the deepest sense of danger, not to be oppressed by it, however, but to surmount it. He thought that all chance of preserving his own life was over; and he resolved to sell that life still dearer to his intended murderers, than even what they had already paid for the attempt to deprive him of it. He did not lose a moment after the villains had entered the room, to act with the determination he had so instantaneously adopted. He struck at the fourth fellow with his knife, and wounded him, and at the same instant he received a blow on the head, and found himself grappled with. He shortened his hold of the knife, and stabbed repeatedly at the fellow with whom he found himself engaged. The floor being slippery with the blood of the wounded men, Sir John and his adversary both fell, and while they were on the ground, Sir John thinking that his thrusts with his knife, though made with all his force, did not seem to produce the decisive effect, which they had in the beginning of the conflict, he examined the point of his weapon with his finger, and found that the blade of it had been bent near the point. As he lay struggling on the ground, he endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to straighten the curvature of the knife; but while one hand was employed in this attempt, he perceived that the grasp of his adversary was losing its constraint and pressure, and in a moment or two after, he found himself released from it; the limbs of the robber were, in fact, by this time, unnerved by death. Sir John found that this fellow had a sword in his hand, and this he immediately seized, and gave several blows with it, his knife being no longer serviceable. At length the robbers, finding so many of their party had been killed or wounded, employed themselves in removing the bodies; and Sir John took this opportunity of retiring to a place a little apart from the house, where he remained a short time. They dragged their companions into the parlour, and having placed chairs with the backs upwards, by means of these they lifted the bodies out of the windows, and afterwards took them away. When the robbers retired, Sir John returned to the house, and called up a man-servant from his bed, who, during this long and bloody conflict, had not appeared, and had consequently received from his master warm and loud upbraiding for his cowardice. Sir John then placed his daughter-in-law, and grandchild, who were his only inmates, in places of safety, and took such precautions as circumstances pointed out, till the daylight appeared. The next day, the alarm having been given, search was made after the robbers, and Sir John, having gone to the house of the prisoner Noonan, upon searching, he found concealed under his bed, the identical short gun with which one of the robbers had fired at him. Noonan was immediately secured and sent to gaol, and upon being visited by Sir John Purcell, he acknowledged that Sir John “had like to do for him,” and was proceeding to show, until Sir John prevented him, the wounds he had received from the knife in his arm.

An accomplice of the name of John Daniel Sullivan was produced, who deposed to the same effect. The party met at Noonan’s house; that they were nine in number, and had arms; that the prisoner was one of the number, and that he carried a small gun. Upon the gun, which was in the court, being produced, with which Sir John had been fired at, the witness said it was that with which the prisoner was armed the night of the attack; that two men were killed, and three dreadfully wounded. The witness stood a long and rigorous examination by Mr. Counsellor O’Connell; but none of the facts seemed to be shaken, though every use was made of the guilty character of the witness. The prisoner made no defence, and Judge Mayne then proceeded to charge the jury, and commended with approbation the bravery and presence of mind displayed throughout a conflict so very unequal and bloody, by Sir John Purcell. The jury, after a few minutes, returned their verdict—guilty.

But it was not only plunder which excited these fearful attacks; party and family feuds were prosecuted in the same savage spirit, even by the light of day. I have heard my wife’s mother relate the following incident, which occurred in her own neighbourhood. About sixty-five years ago there lived at Llanelwth Hall, midway between Llandilo and Llandovery, a gentleman of considerable fortune of the name of Powell. He had separated from his wife, by whom he had two daughters,—and her brother, Captain Bowen, inflamed by the animosity which naturally arises out of such family divisions, and supposed to be instigated by a paramour of the lady’s of the name of Williams, engaged, in concert with this Williams, a band of men to accompany him on a pretended smuggling expedition; and having plied them well with promises of ample payment and plenty of liquor—a bottle of brandy and a pair of new shoes for the day—marched up to Powell’s house at twelve o’clock at noon, and at the time of Llandilo fair, when the conspirators knew that Powell’s servants would be absent. The only persons actually left in the house with him, were an old woman, and a daughter of this very Bowen’s. The conspirators advanced to the front door, and entered the hall, where the old woman met them. Her they seized, and bound to the leg of an old massy oak table. Powell, attracted to the hall by the noise, was immediately seized and literally hewn to pieces in the most horrible manner in the presence of the old woman, and of the murderer’s own daughter, who alarmed at the entrance of so grim a band, had concealed herself under this table. The girl from that hour lost her senses, and wandered about the country, a confirmed maniac. My informant often saw this girl at her mother’s, who was kind to her, and where she often therefore came, having a particular seat by the fire always left for her. In a lucid interval, they once ventured to ask her what she recollected of this shocking event. She said that she believed she had fainted, and on coming to herself, saw her father stand with a hatchet over her uncle in the act to give him another blow, and that she actually saw her uncle’s face hanging over his shoulder. At this point of the recital, the recollection of the horrors of it came upon her so strongly, that she fell into one of her most violent fits of madness, and they never dared to mention the subject afterwards in her presence.

A fall of snow happening while the murderers were in the house, caused them to be tracked and secured, and Bowen and several, if not all, of his accomplices were executed. Williams made his escape, and was afterwards taken as a sailor on board an American vessel during the war, where he was recognised by some of his countrymen. He made, however, a second escape, as is supposed through the connivance of some relenting neighbour, and never was heard of afterwards. My informant well recollects two of these murderers coming to her mother’s house at Cyfarthfa, a few days after the perpetration of the outrage, having so long managed to elude their pursuers. They were equipped as travelling tinkers; but they had new knapsacks, and what was more provocative of notice at that moment, very downcast and melancholy aspects. They felt by the looks which the mistress of the house fixed on them, that they were suspected, and immediately hastened away over the hills towards Aberdare, where they were secured the next day.

A fact related by a minister of the Society of Friends, shews at once the primitive simplicity which still prevails in some retired districts, and the evident power of faith in Providence over the spirit of evil. In one of the thinly-peopled dales of that very beautiful, and yet by parts, very bleak and dreary region—the Peak of Derbyshire, stood a single house far from neighbours. It was inhabited by a farmer and his family, who lived in such a state of isolation, so unmolested by intruders, and unapprehensive of danger, that they were hardly in the habit of fastening their door at night. The farmer who had a great distance to go to market, was sometimes late before he got back,—late it may be supposed according to their habits; for in such old-fashioned places, where there is nothing to excite and keep alive the attention but their daily labour, the good people when the day’s duties are at an end, drop into bed almost before the sun himself; and are all up, and pursuing their several occupations, almost before the sun too. On these occasions, the good woman used to retire to rest at the usual time, and her husband returning found no latch nor bolt to obstruct his entrance. But one time the wife hearing some one come up to the door, and enter the house, supposed it was her husband; but, after the usual time had elapsed, and he did not come to bed, she got up and went down stairs, when her terror and astonishment may be imagined, for she saw a great sturdy fellow in the act of reconnoitring for plunder. At the first view of him, she afterwards said, she felt ready to drop; but being naturally courageous, and of a deeply religious disposition, she immediately recovered sufficient self-possession to avoid any outcry, and to walk with apparent firmness to a chair which stood on one side of the fireplace. The marauder immediately seated himself in another chair which stood opposite, and fixed his eyes upon her with a most savage expression. Her courage was now almost spent; but recollecting herself, she put up an inward prayer to the Almighty for protection, and threw herself upon his providence. She immediately felt her internal strength revive, and looked steadfastly at the man, who now had drawn from his pocket a large clasp-knife, opened it, and with a murderous expression in his eyes, appeared ready to spring upon her. She however evinced no visible emotion; she said not a word; but continued to pray for deliverance, or resignation; and to look on the fearful man with a calm seriousness. He rose up, looked at her, then at the knife; then wiped it across his hand; then again eagerly glanced at her; when, at once, a sudden damp seemed to fall upon him; his eyes seemed to blench before her still fixed gaze; he closed his knife, and went out. At a single spring she reached the door; shot the bolt with a convulsive rapidity, and fell senseless on the floor. When she recovered from her swoon, she was filled with the utmost anxiety on account of her husband, lest the villain should meet him by the way. But presently, she heard his well-known step; his well-known voice on finding the door fastened; and let him in with a heart trembling with mingled agitation and thankfulness. Great as had been her faith on this occasion, and great the interposition of Providence, we may be sure that she would not risk the exercise of the one, or tempt the other, by neglecting in future to shoot the bolt of the door; and her husband, at once taught the danger of his house and of his own passage home, made it a rule to leave the market-town at least an hour earlier after the winter markets.

The unwelcome visitant in this anecdote is one of that class of offenders called “sturdy rogues.” Of the real “sturdy rogue” the city, amongst all its numerous varieties of rogues, knows nothing. He forms one of the terrors of the solitary house. They are such places that he haunts, because he there finds opportunities in the absence of the men to frighten and bully the women. If he find only a single woman left, as is often the case in harvest time, or at fair or market time, when all the family that can leave have left, he then makes the terror of his presence a means of extorting large booty. What can be more fearful than for a single individual, but especially for a woman, at a lonely house, while all the men are absent in the fields, or elsewhere, to see a huge brawny fellow of ill looks come to the door, peering about with a suspicious inquisitiveness, armed with a sturdy staff, followed, perhaps, by a strong sullen bull-dog, professing himself a tinker, a rag-gatherer, a rat-catcher—anything, under which to hide evil designs? Nothing, truly, can be more appalling, except when under the garb of a woman, you feel assured that you have a man before you; or a troop of fellows acting the distressed tradesmen, or sailors with nothing on their bodies, perhaps, but a pair of trousers, and on their heads a handkerchief tied. When such sturdy vagabonds come, and first cringe and beg in a piteous tone, till, having spied out the real nakedness of the place, as to physical strength, they rise in their demands, hint strange things; instead of going away when desired, walk into the house, grow insolent, and at length downright thievish and outrageous,—these are circumstances of peculiar terror not to be exceeded in human experience, and which yet have been often experienced by the dwellers in solitary houses.

I have heard a lady describe her sensations in such a situation. A figure in a man’s hat, tied down with an India silk handkerchief, blue cloak and stuff petticoat, suddenly appeared before her, and demanded a supply of articles of female attire. She offered half-a-crown to be rid of this unpleasant guest, for there was something about her which filled the lady with apprehension; but the money was refused, and with a gesture that threw open the cloak, and revealed the real figure of a man, with naked arms, and in a white Marseilles waistcoat. The demand for women’s garments was complied with as speedily as possible, and the person hastily went away. The next day, the lady on going to the neighbouring town, beheld a large handbill in the post-office window, offering a reward of 100l. for the apprehension of a delinquent charged with high crimes and misdemeanours, and described as “a Dane well known to the nobility and gentry, having been master of the ceremonies at Brighton and Tunbridge Wells.” It was the very description of her yesterday’s guest.

But when night is added to such a situation, how much is its fearfulness increased! Imagine one or two unprotected women sitting by the fire of a lone house, on a winter’s evening, with a consciousness of the insecurity of their situation upon them. How instinct with danger becomes every thing, every movement, every sound!—the stirring of the trees—the whispering of the wind—the rustling of a leaf—the cry of a bird. They are not wishing to listen, but cannot help it; they are all sense; all eye and ear. A foot is heard without, and is lost again! A face is suddenly placed against a pane in the window! the latch of the door is slowly raised in their sight, or the click of one is heard where it is not seen. Imagine this, and you imagine what has thrilled through the heart, and frozen the blood of many a tenant of a solitary house.